Short Programs

Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty [PI.61s]

Date: TBD, 2010 | Tuition: $1,600 (tentative)| Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 1.4 (tentative)

Course Summary  |  Learning Objectives  |  Who Should Attend  |  Program Outline  |  Schedule  | 
About the Lecturers  |  Discounts  |  Updates

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Course Summary

This course focuses on human-centered strategies for leading effective teams in academic engineering environments. Through a series of interactive role-playing activities, self-assessment instruments, and group discussions, you will develop a repertoire of techniques for addressing issues that commonly arise within engineering research groups and teaching staff.

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.

What past participants have said:

"As a PhD student, I learned how to do research and teach classes. Unfortunately for my early graduate students, I had learned very little about how to guide students in their graduate studies. Only through experience have I learned how to adapt to the wide range of learning styles and motivations of different students. It's great to have Chuck and Charles be able to present this kind of understanding to our faculty in a practical and relevant form." - Prof. Randal Bryant, Dean, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University

"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, Mech. E., MIT

"I admit I was skeptical, but I was amazed that so much of the material was genuinely universal." - Prof. Vivek Goyal, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, MIT

Learning Objectives

• Recognize and describe your own brain-dominance profile and how it affects personal leadership style and effectiveness
• Apply the skills of visioning and mentoring to create opportunities for yourself and others
• Apply situational-leadership concepts to the various challenges encountered when developing students in an academic environment
• Define and use techniques and approaches for conflict management, and for handling interpersonal dynamics more creatively
• Be able to understand and articulate how leadership styles affect research, education, and the learning process

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for those who wish to enhance their leadership potential by learning more about themselves. As we grow and gain experience in our work and life, it's valuable to pause when possible and take a look at who we are becoming. In addition, a brave assessment of the skills and attributes we have accumulated may assist us in striking out to build new personal options.

Participants should have at least one-year teaching in engineering, science, or other project-based field.

Program Outline

This program is highly experiential, discovery based, and full of mutual "air time" for all to share ideas and insights. We use short videos, case examples, role-plays, group work, short lectures, and lots of dialog to investigate the topics below. The idea is to keep participants engaged and interacting throughout the entire course. Discussion topics will include:

• Group culture
• Team leadership
• Conflict resolution
• Student advising and mentoring
• Motivation
• Emotions
• Diversity
• Balancing work and family
• Reputation and tenure

Using an array of behavioral models, along with a set of easy-to-use assessment inventories, we investigate key aspects of the self knowledge that makes leaders successful, including:

• The techniques and substance behind creating driving visions and missions for our lives and work
• Ways to further understand what motivates us (and others), and successful ways to leverage motivational energy for success
• How our individual and highly unique brain works, and how we are similar and different because of our thinking preferences
• Various ways we communicate and solve problems
• Specific styles of leadership we most like and most frequently display
• The several behavioral options we have available to us when dealing with conflict and other emotional aspects of relating to others

Course schedule and registration times

Class runs 8:30 am - 5:30 pm each day for both sessions.

Registration for session I, June 15-16, 2009 is on Monday morning from
7:45 - 8:15 am.

Registration for session II, July 13-14, 2009 is on Monday morning from
7:45 - 8:15 am.

Please note that laptops are required for this course.

About The Lecturers

Charles E. Leiserson
Prof. Leiserson received a B.S. degree in computer science and mathematics from Yale University, New Haven, CT, in 1975 and a Ph.D. degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, in 1981. In 1981 he joined the faculty of MIT. He currently holds the position of Professor of Computing Science and Engineering in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and is a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. He leads the Supercomputing Technologies (SuperTech) research group and is a member of the Theory of Computation research group in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Prof. Leiserson's research centers on developing theoretical principles of parallel and distributed computing, especially as they relate to engineering reality. Prof. Leiserson pioneered the development of VLSI theory and has written many papers on VLSI algorithms, graph layout, and computer-aided design. His contributions include the divide-and-conquer method of graph layout and the "retiming" method for optimizing digital circuitry. Prof. Leiserson has been a leader in the development of parallel computing. As a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, he wrote the first paper on "systolic" architecture with his advisor H.T. Kung. While Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation, he designed and led the implementation of the network architecture for the Connection Machine Model CM-5 Supercomputer, which incorporates the "fat-tree" interconnection network he developed at MIT. Prof. Leiserson has designed and engineered many parallel algorithms, including ones for matrix linear algebra, graph algorithms, optimization, and sorting. Of particular note, he introduced the notion of "cache-oblivious" algorithms, which exploit a hierarchy of processor caches efficiently without any tuning of cache-dependent parameters.

Prof. Leiserson's recent research has focused on multicore computing. He developed the first provably good "work-stealing" scheduler that guarantees the efficient execution of multithreaded programs. He and his SuperTech research group designed and developed the "Cilk" multithreaded programming language, which incorporates work-stealing and vastly simplifies multiprocessor programming. His research team implemented the StarTech, *Socrates, and Cilkchess parallel chess-playing programs, which have won numerous prizes in international competition. A team of Cilk programmers led by Prof. Leiserson won First Prize in the 1998 ICFP Programming Contest sponsored by the International Conference on Functional Programming, in which Cilk was declared to the "the programming language of choice for discriminating hackers."

Prof. Leiserson's academic work has won many other awards. His Ph.D. dissertation, Area-Efficient VLSI Computation, which deals with the design of systolic systems and with the problems of determining the VLSI area of a graph, won the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award in 1982, as well as the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Doctoral Thesis Prize. In 1985 he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. His textbook Introduction to Algorithms, co-authored with Ronald L. Rivest and Thomas H. Cormen, was named Best 1990 Professional and Scholarly Book in Computer Science and Data Processing by the Association of American Publishers. The textbook, now in its second edition with an additional coauthor, Clifford Stein, has been the leading textbook on computer algorithms for many years and is the most cited work in all of computer science.

Prof. Leiserson is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and SIAM. In 1995-96, he was Shaw Visiting Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He is past Computer Science Program Chair for the Singapore-MIT Alliance, a distance-education initiative in which students in Singapore take MIT classes. He held an Adjunct Professorship at the National University of Singapore for many years and was Director of System Architecture, Director of Research, and Network Architect at Akamai Technologies, Inc. of Cambridge, MA. He is founder and currently serves as Chief Technology Officer of Cilk Arts, Inc., of Burlington, MA, which is commercializing the Cilk technology he developed at MIT. A dedicated teacher, Prof. Leiserson has directly supervised 20 Ph.D. students and over 50 Master's and Bachelor's students. For more information about Prof. Leiserson, please visit his web site.

Prof. Leiserson was recently selected as a MacVicar fellow, which recognizes faculty who have made exemplary and sustained contributions to the teaching and education of undergraduates at MIT.

Chuck McVinney
Chuck McVinney is principal of McVinney & Company, an organizational development and executive consulting company. He is an educator, facilitator, and consultant who has specialized for over 20 years in the creative process, the improvement of interpersonal dynamics (team development), and the crafting of excellent learning events for organizations. He is especially known for his work with emerging and merging organizations, helping entrepreneurs and CEO's create cultures and work environments where values that support sustainability and creativity are deeply held and applied.

Chuck has been a corporate consultant and public speaker in demand for over 15 years. His work with learning and education in public and private sectors spans over 30 years. He has traveled all over the world carrying his message of creativity and sustainability. He has worked in Europe and in Southeast Asia and co-led the design, development, and implementation of a series of creative management and leadership programs at the Singapore Institute of Management in the early 1990's. These programs are based on the Whole Brain Model created by Ned Herrmann, and it represents a technology Chuck has helped to refine and apply with Herrmann and his associates over the last 20 years.

Chuck has been published in numerous professional journals including an article called Dream Weavers, for the American Society of Training and Development, and is coauthor of Engineering Management: People and Projects, Battelle Press (1995), a book about creativity, teams, and technical project management.

Chuck has a Liberal Arts Degree from the State University of New York (Geneseo), and holds a Masters Degree in Educational Psychology from Clark University.

Group Discounts

Multiple registrants applying together from the same university for this course are eligible for group discounts. Groups of 2 to 5 receive a 10% discount, while groups of 6 or more receive 15% off tuition. Contact the Short Programs office with the names of group members in order to be considered for the discount. All applications must be submitted before any discount can be applied.

Government Grantees

The cost of tuition for this workshop may be eligible for direct charging to a sponsored research project, because workshop activities can be identified specifically with the participant’s particular project and benefit the project directly. Please check with your university’s office of sponsored programs.

Updates

Please note that laptops are required for this course.