Workshop: Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty

MIT Professional Education will be holding a workshop entitled “Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty” on June 18-19, 2012.

Who should attend: This hands-on workshop can provide significant insights to junior faculty, senior faculty, department heads, and higher administrators involved in technical research and teaching. Non-academics and students may not attend.

Focus: Human-centered strategies for leading effective teams in technical academic environments. Through a series of interactive role-playing activities, self-assessment instruments, and group discussions, you and your colleagues will develop a repertoire of techniques for addressing issues that commonly arise within technical research groups and among teaching staff.

Participant outcomes: An appreciation of how your own leadership style affects research, education, and the learning process. You will gain insights into

•    emotions in the workplace
•    communicating effectively with people who think differently from you
•    how to foster creativity
•    dealing with conflict
•    giving effective feedback
•    how different situations call for different leadership strategies
•    student motivation
•    self-understanding as a leader

Pedagogy: The workshop promotes awareness of the participants’ own styles of leadership and offers them new approaches to explore. Since leadership styles are highly individual and situational, the instructors do not judge styles as “good” or “bad,” but provide a nonjudgmental yet structured environment in which you can discover what works for you. No dogma! — just scientifically informed frameworks and models of human behavior to leverage your own common sense.

Instructors

* Charles E. Leiserson, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, MIT 
* Chuck McVinney, Management Consultant, McVinney & Company 

What Participants Say

More than 95% of over 300 past participants have graded this workshop A or A+.
Here are some of their comments:

“The professor/student role-playing taught me how differences in communication styles can seriously complicate interactions, a poignant and unforgettable lesson.” Prof. Polina Golland, MIT

“Tremendously helpful!  I learned many key things essential to running a group and 
interacting with others that you don’t learn anywhere else.”  Prof. Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, Mechanical Engineering, MIT 

“I strongly recommend this workshop to anyone in a supervisory role.” 
Dr. Jim Glass, Computer Science, MIT 

“I wish I took this course 10 years ago. Today is a milestone in my understanding of who I am as a professor.” Sagar Kamarlhi, Associate Professor, Northeastern University

“I wish I had taken this in my first year as a faculty.” Alan Aspuru-Guzik, Associate Professor, Harvard University

“An eye opener on human relationships and leadership founded on rigorous personality classification and human motivation. Every professor should take it.” Rahul Sarpeshkar, Associate Professor, MIT

“Only through experience have I learned how to adapt to the wide range of learning styles and motivations of different students. It was great to have Chuck and Charles present this kind of understanding to our faculty in a practical and relevant form.”
Dean Randal Bryant, Carnegie Mellon U.

“16 hours well spent! Best workshop I’ve attended!” Prof. David Patterson, U. California, Berkeley

How to Register

$1,600 – Regular Tuition
$1,360 – Tuition for MIT faculty after 15% group discount is applied
MIT’s Office of Sponsored Programs advises that the cost is eligible for direct charging to a sponsored research project, because workshop activities can be identified specifically with the participant’s particular project and benefits that project directly.

In addition, the Dean of Engineering has made eight full scholarships available for faculty in the School of Engineering and the Dean of Science will provide full funding for interested tenure-track faculty members in the School of Science.

For more information, please visit the course website or contact MIT Professional Education Short Programs by e-mailing shortprograms@mit.edu. If you wish to register, you should do so by May 18. 

Note: Space is limited and will be filled on a first-come, first-serve basis.

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