Short Programs

Challenges of Leadership in Teams

Date: July 22-26, 2013 | Tuition: $4,950 | Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 2.9
Application Deadline »

Overview  |  Who Should Attend  |  Learning Objectives  |  Program Outline  |  Schedule  | 
Participants' Comments  |  About the Instructors  |  Location  |  Updates

Overview

Most successful team-based organizations have been transformed from a traditional leadership environment to a collaborative, shared leadership environment where the importance of empowering team members is recognized. Such transformation poses challenges to leaders of all types of teams. This course covers ten specific challenges that are identified under Course Topics below. These challenges prepare leaders to negotiate and facilitate the complexities of leading teams throughout their team life cycle. Once leaders have faced these challenges, their capabilities will improve in specific management areas. Learning to use these new capabilities in a team environment will enhance a team leader's ability to self-assess and to select the most effective management style for a specific situation. Judging one management style relative to another is ineffective; instead participants learn the level required to improve task performance.

The challenges of leadership in teams covered in this course are easy to apply in any management situation and will enable formation of teams that organize faster, think collaboratively, and are productive. They help create an environment where leaders can successfully support their teams in a competent professional atmosphere. Participants learn how to manage a team by providing structure and developing trust during the life cycle of a project. The leadership development model used in this course allows team leaders to organize and execute complex projects without the stress of miscommunication and distrust.

Learning how to strategically integrate the ten leadership challenges into your daily routine will support development of the skills and techniques managers need to navigate organizational transformations of work in order to successfully guide project teams and to communicate effectively with clients, other team leaders, middle and senior management, CEOs, and Boards of Directors. These challenges are the foundation for our research-based instructional program. The program utilizes training exercises for introducing the concepts of facilitating and coaching into a culture aimed at delivering results, with a particular focus on the need for collaboration and empowerment of all team members. By incorporating a hands-on interactive approach, each participant should have a significant opportunity to expand his/her competencies by receiving both feedback and insight from the faculty throughout the various stages of the team process.

Who Should Attend

The course is appropriate for anyone who is, or will be, involved in leading and managing teams in any field. Although the majority of participants in some years have had engineering or scientific training, the course has proven useful for individuals from a variety of other backgrounds including doctors, lawyers, government and military personnel, managers in human resources and financial areas, and project managers in general. Participants are expected to have some background in team-building and/or team management skills.

Learning Objectives

• Learn how to apply already-learned basics and expand your level of expertise
• Review your personal management skills and how to apply them to teams
• Assess yourself as a team leader/manager by understanding your strengths and weaknesses, choosing three or four areas in your leadership abilities you wish to develop
• Learn to manage a team by identifying your competencies through the ten challenges
• Understand your emotional intelligence and utilize it to manage others
• Explore Strategic Project Management
• Learn what conflict styles you use when settling differences of opinion
• Learn how to plan and facilitate effective conflict management
• Learn to develop a leadership mindset
• Learn to facilitate and coach in a culture aimed at delivering results
• Learn how to reduce uncertainty on a team through effective socialization
• Learn how to transform your leadership to a more adaptive style that fits your organizational culture
• Learn how effective intercultural communication can enhance your leadership abilities
• Learn how to develop your leadership style by creating a development plan

  
  

Program Outline

Challenge 1:  The Leadership Development Model
Learn the structures and systems that need to be integrated into a model that can be globally adapted to any organizational structure.

Challenge 2:  Leadership Self-Assessment
Certain assessment surveys can facilitate a leader’s understanding of their present management style and abilities. Drawing upon these assessment results will allow a leader to develop their skills further. 

Challenge 3:  Leadership Challenges when Forming the Team
Clearly defining the structure of the team under a predetermined team formation model is essential. These predetermined essentials are creating a vision, systems of behavior, and an understanding that there are two processes simultaneously in effect—the team and task processes. This approach facilitates learning to use individuals’ competencies to form a team.

Challenge 4: Project Management: Emotional Intelligence (EI), Strategic Project Management, and Unique Challenges of Cross-Functional Teams
With a solid project design, leaders can use their EI skills to build trust, handle conflict, give and take criticism constructively, deal with people who don't deliver, generate team commitment, and keep others motivated. Sharpening your EI means developing yourself in four major domains. 

Most projects never get off the ground because ad hoc, haphazard, and obsolete methods fail to turn their ideas into coherent and actionable plans. Strategic project management uses an approach to designing projects and action initiatives that builds on critical questions which teams must intelligently answer in order to create their own strong, strategic foundation.

Cross-functional project teams have become common in recent years. Because they involve people with different expertise working toward a common goal, cross-functional teams can be immensely powerful but offer additional challenges to project team leaders. How to lead in the absence of organizational or line authority is a skill that is important for project leaders, as well as managers leading outside of their areas of expertise, to understand. 

Challenge 5: Leading through Negotiation and Conflict Management
Conflict is a difference of opinion. A leader’s main focus when managing a team conflict is to understand other members’ conflict styles and to facilitate the ability of members to understand and develop the use of more effective styles. Conflict can be beneficial for a team when managed successfully. Using principled negotiation and planning the team’s negotiations for resources as a developed leadership skill can support team success.

Challenge 6: Leadership Mindsets
Mindset management provides cognitive insight into how we move away from limited personal goals to more systemic activities that have measurable outcomes and become part of a network of skills within an organization. These principles are predicated upon coaches and team facilitators utilizing a skill set that includes specific, learnable skills such as relationship building, problem-solving, and effective listening. Learning objectives include teaching leaders to develop a personal understanding of thinking and coaching styles. This session reviews recent findings in biological and behavioral studies that have helped to form a scientific basis for understanding mindset management.

Challenge 7:  Team Communication and Socialization
Innovation and motivation are inextricably linked to the generation and reduction of uncertainty, albeit in very different ways. Innovation and change are related to the full cycle of the generation and reduction of uncertainty while motivation is predominantly related to its reduction. Miscommunication within teams leads to stress and anxiety, which generates the uncertainty that needs to be reduced. Behaviors are situational in this respect. Focused leadership values the differences in priorities, backgrounds, and values that exist in the team members.

Challenge 8:  Leading in an Intercultural Environment
To lead in a culturally diverse environment, a leader must be able to recognize cultural variables to increase cultural sensitivity. It is essential to understand how these variables influence communication and, therefore, team dynamics. As a leader, recognizing how to maximize intercultural communication strengths and minimize potential difficulties is an important ability to learn.

Challenge 9:  Gender Issues in Leadership
Gender differences in the workplace can be theoretically viewed as cultural differences, which should be mediated. Gender can be a challenge to clear communication and cooperation. Once diversity is clarified, gender issues can be minimized to maximize comfort and productivity. 
             
Challenge 10:  Leadership Strategies:  Leading Team Development
Learn how to integrate competencies and personal leadership assessment results into an individual leadership development plan.

Course schedule and registration times

View tentative 2013 Course Schedule

Registration is on Monday morning from 8:15 - 8:45 am. Class runs 9:00 am - 5:30 pm except Friday when session ends at 4:30 PM.

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM Session
10:15 AM - 12:30 PM Session
1:00 PM - 2:45 PM Session
3:00 PM - 5:30 PM Session

Please note that there are nightly readings assigned each day of class. Before the first day of class, participants will have been provided with and are expected to have read the reading notes for that day.

Participants' Comments

Program Manager, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
"This course reminds you that you can still be the best leader regardless of the environment. [It] pushes you to think, which is rare these days."

ASE-Trainee, TATA Consultancy Services
"The best part of the program was the interaction with the staff. They were just amazing. They were really helpful and I could approach them at any time and they would just help out. Personally I approached every lecturer to get my problem solved and everyone provided their perspective. I was really impressed."

Program Integration Manager, NASA
"The class was the most diverse group of students I have ever been a part of. And the instructors engaged and included all of us in discussions and conversations aimed to improve our understanding of the material. I got a tremendous benefit from taking this class and am grateful to the staff of your institute and the instructors for letting me participate."

About the Instructors

Lori Breslow, Ph.D. is a Senior Lecturer in the Sloan School of Management where she teaches courses in managerial, professional, and intercultural communication. She is also the Director of the Teaching and Learning Laboratory at MIT. TLL works with faculty, administrators, staff, and students to strengthen the quality of education at the Institute. Dr. Breslow's research interests are in interdisciplinary education and peer learning.

Bonnie Burrell van Stephoudt is co-director of this course. She is a lecturer in the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT and has her Master's degree in Management from Harvard University. She is presently teaching team development to Chemical Engineering students. In collaboration with Dr. Colton, she has been developing the integration of interpersonal communication and team building skills into undergraduate and graduate engineering education. She conducts research in the areas of interpersonal business communication including collaboration, leadership skills, and assessment methods. Her publications include Conflict Management Theory and The Team Development Model.

Clark K. Colton is co-director of this course and is a professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Dr. Colton has written over 200 publications in chemical engineering and bioengineering and has received many awards. In collaboration with Bonnie Burrell, he teaches interpersonal business and technical communication skills to students in Chemical Engineering in addition to other technical courses, and is working to expand interpersonal communication and team building training into undergraduate and graduate engineering subjects.

Keith Dionne received his M.S. in Technology and Policy and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from MIT. He was one of the initial scientists in the founding of CytoTherapeutics Inc., where he led the effort to develop immunoisolation systems for the treatment of diabetes. Dr. Dionne later moved to Alza, where he led the research and development group for implantable drug delivery systems. In that role, he developed the DurosTM technology, which is now marketed as ViadurTM for the treatment of prostate cancer. Keith grew the Technology Solutions group at Millennium Pharmaceuticals into a $100M/yr business. He was the CEO of Alantos Pharmaceuticals, a private transatlantic drug discovery company that was sold to Amgen for $300M in 2007. Keith Dionne is currently CEO of Surface Logix, a Metabolic Disease discovery and development company.

Dr. Ralph Katz is a Professor of R&D Management at Northeastern University's College of Business and Principal Research Associate at M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management. He received his M.B.A. and Ph.D. Degrees from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. For more than twenty-five years, Professor Katz has been carrying out extensive management research, education, and consulting on technology-based innovation with a particular interest in the management and motivation of technical professionals and high performing groups and project teams.

Dr. Katz has conducted numerous workshops and seminars on Research, Development, and Engineering management topics to technical staff professionals, managers, and senior executives in many organizations both within and outside the U.S. He has worked with many companies to improve their management of technology practices and innovation processes. Among his more recent clients are many major industrial corporations, including Dupont, Motorola, Procter and Gamble, Atofina Chemicals, Lockheed-Martin, Sparta, Panasonic Technologies, Goodrich, Abbott Labs, UCB, EMC, NRO, Master Foods, Inc., NASA Glenn Research Center, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Dr. Katz is also the Faculty Leader and Coordinator of the 3-Day Management of Technology and Innovation Executive Program at California Institute of Technology. For more than ten years, he organized and led the Management of Technology and Management of Technical Professionals Courses at IBM's Corporate Technical Institute. Professor Katz has also taught within the Executive Programs of Columbia, Berkeley, Chalmers, St. Gallen, IESE, Copenhagen Business School, Emory, and Carnegie Mellon Universities and was a visiting scholar at INSEAD in Paris during the 2003-2004 academic year. He has published several books and numerous articles in leading professional journals. His most recent book is entitled The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 2003.

In 1981, Professor Katz was awarded the "New Concept Award" by the National Academy of Management for that year's most outstanding contribution to the field of organizational behavior. He was also the 1986 recipient of the R&D Management Journal's "Best Paper" Award and the 1990 and 1991 recipient of the Academy of Management TIM Division's "Best Paper" Awards. Prof. Katz serves on several journal editorial boards and is currently the R&D/Innovation and Entrepreneurship Departmental Editor for Management Science.

Harold V. Langlois has spent the last 30 years of his career with one foot firmly anchored in the day-to-day leadership responsibilities of managing complex organizations and the other rooted in the theoretical world of academe. Beginning in the early 1990s, Dr. Langlois held senior executive positions at various financial firms, where he was responsible for constructing a Division of Wealth Management, designing and implementing innovative education programs for financial advisors, and overseeing the cultural integration of these firms as they became acquired. These experiences have given him an understanding of the challenges and mindsets of advisors, whether working in global firms in the investment or insurance sectors or providing advice within the independent sector.

Since 2006, Dr. Langlois has dedicated his efforts to lecturing and coaching business executives on improving their leadership skills. His approach is highly interactive and he concentrates on providing the latest research in the areas of leadership, teamwork communications, change management, and neurobiology.

Harold holds a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and for the past fifteen years he has been a member of the graduate faculty at Harvard University teaching courses on managing change, leadership, and teamwork. In Fall 2007 he offered a web-based graduate course streamed worldwide each week as part of Harvard’s distance learning initiative. He was the recipient of the Joanne Fussa Distinguished Teaching Award at Harvard in 2002.

Bhaskar Pant is the Executive Director of MIT Professional Education, the office that oversees Short Programs and this course. He is a truly global individual, born in southern Africa, educated in the UK and US, and having lived and worked in four continents. Pant became an avid practitioner of intercultural communication while working in senior business management positions globally for technology and media companies such as Tektronix, Sony, and Turner Broadcasting/Time Warner. For the past decade, he has also taught “global people skills” to hundreds of professionals around the world, initially via his own training company he founded in New Delhi and later while heading the professional training arm of the Graduate School for International Training in Vermont. After joining MIT, Pant has taught intercultural communication classes to MIT students enrolled in the Gordon Leadership Program, the Engineering Projects Lab, and the Career Reengineering Program. In addition, Pant teaches a graduate management course titled “Intercultural Communication in the Global Workplace” at Harvard University’s Extension School. Pant received his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester and a Masters Degree in Communications from Indiana University, Bloomington.

Terry Schmidt is an international management consultant, strategic thinker, entrepreneur, and educator who specializes in leadership, strategic management, and change. He has 30 years of experience assisting corporations, governments, and research organizations in 32 countries worldwide. He earned his BS in engineering from the University of Washington and his MBA from Harvard University.

Terry is president of ManagementPro (USA) and a global partner in the Centre for Strategic Management. Before starting his own company, he worked for Boeing, NASA, the US Department of Transportation, Management Analysis Centre, and the US Embassy in Thailand.

His U.S. clients include eBay, Boeing, Sony Electronics, Grumman Aerospace, Walt Disney Imagineering, Nokia, Cargill, PATH, Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Transamerica Insurance, and the LA Times. Terry teaches strategy at the UCLA Technical Management Program and is on the faculty of the Los Alamos Laboratory Management Institute.

He has seven published books; his most recent is Turning Strategy Into Action. Co-authored with Dr. Hendrie Weisinger, his next book, The Emotionally Intelligent Project Manager, will be published in the fall of 2007. Terry is the winner of the esteemed Theodore von Karman trophy from AIAA and the Charles T. Main Award from ASME. His career is listed in Who's Who in International Training and Development (3rd ed), Who's Who in Finance and Industry (23rd ed), and Who's Who in the World (6th ed).

Location

This course takes place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We can also offer this course for groups of employees at your location. Please contact the Short Programs office for further details.

Updates

There are no updates at this time.