General Information
Promotional Video
Unavailable
Target Audience
This course is intended for students interested in developing a sophisticated skill set in leading teams, or for those who wish to enter management, consulting, and People and Culture divisions of organizations.
Format
Winter Intensive 2024 (January). Anticipated in-class time to be 8 3-hour sessions.
Course Mission
Teams expand capability beyond what a single individual can do. For this reason, most businesses could not even function without the teams that accomplish the lofty and complex objectives that business seek to do, with teams found among shop floor production crews, in the executive suite, and virtually, spread across locations, time zones, cultures, and at times languages. Even as they are a way of life in many organizations, misconceptions and difficulties stand in the way of effective teamwork, necessitating a need for leadership. However, leaders, too, can be misguided in the choices they make to lead teams, for example, by breaking morale in their pursuit to achieve performance objectives. This course proposes an effective way to lead teams – the coaching model – to accomplish complex objectives and sustain morale.
Course Scope
To advance our discussion of the coaching model of leadership, the course scope targets four learning outcomes. The first will focus on strategies that help students observe teams, notably by understanding differences among team members, reading micro-behaviors and expressions, and tracking communication processes. The second will focus on diagnosing common sources of dysfunction, including process loss that manifests for different types of work, and ongoing sources of conflict that originate from misunderstanding or bias. The third identifies strategies leaders can use to optimize team effectiveness, focusing on those that optimize a team’s performance while also sustaining or strengthening morale, and will involve discussions of team design, launch, change and review. The final learning outcome focuses on getting students to see themselves as leaders, that is, to empower them to see what they can do to help teams thrive. With this outcome in mind, students will learn about themselves through an online leadership self-assessment, and by doing teamwork – throughout the course, they will have a chance to apply the strategies they learn through case analysis, in-class team activities, and self-reflection of their own experiences.
The assignments, too, are designed to assess student mastery at these four course learning outcomes. The first will be from the perspective of a consultant team making recommendations on how to improve the dynamics of another team (team assignment), where each consultant team will find a suitable client (outside of Rotman), analyze the team based on feedback the client is seeking, provide the client with a report summarizing your conclusions, and submit a summary of the entire project for grading. The second will be a self-appraisal of the student’s own potential as a team leader (individual assignment). The course is designed to be taught in the Winter intensive, with students having two weeks after sessions end to complete the team assignment, and then a week after that to complete the individual assignment.
Evaluation and Grade Distribution
| Component | Due Date | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Class Participation | Ongoing | 20% |
| Consulting Assignment (Team) | Two Weeks after Session 8 (Typically) | 40% |
| Leadership Self-Appraisal (Individual) | One Week after Team Assignment is Submitted (Typically) | 40% |
Required Resources
A book and selected course packet will be prepared for this course. The book, in my experience, is the best ongoing resource available for learning about leading teams. The readings will include a collection of the very best, most focused articles and chapters addressing issues of interest to the course as well as enable access to some exercises and simulations used for the course. The professor will distribute supplementary materials throughout.