TMP Course Descriptions: Period 4

This course developed from personal experiences transitioning from an engineering/technical role into a team lead and management positions.

At the end of this course, you will be able to accomplish the following:

• Apply appropriate personal assessments for yourself and team
• Develop an intentional connection between your personal story and your professional ethics
• Diagnose team performance successes and failures
• Identify the impact of emotional intelligence on your leadership style

Course Outline

Day 1

Personal Assessments and Teamwork There are so many personal assessments out there it is overwhelming to know which is most appropriate for you to take (for yourself and for your team). We cover the four categories of personal assessments (personality, behavior, strengths, and growth), the value you can gain from each, and the pitfalls of applying those to your improvement plans. You will have new tools to write more effective performance evaluations at the end of this session.

Day 2

Personal Values and Your Story Personal assessments are designed to take your complexity, filter the noise, and provide a lens to view yourself and your team. However, in this session we examine personal identity empirically, through our personal stories. This provides insight to our personal values that provide the foundation for our professional ethos.

Day 3

Team formation and performance We’ve all been on teams where things clicked and everything got done on time, or on teams where there was significant friction and we limped across the finish-line. In this session we discuss methods for diagnosing and measuring team performance to help you intentionally build a team that works well together every time.

Day 4

Diagnosing Challenges and Applying Remedies This session is dedicated to examining the challenges we each face as we transition to a new leadership role, start a new project, work with a new team, or handle turnover in team personnel. This is an open discussion on how to apply the previous three sessions that you are facing in your roles.

Day 5

Emotional Intelligence and Resonant Leadership During this session we talk about leadership styles, and in particular, the Resonant Leadership framework for leadership styles. As we approach different leadership styles, it is helpful to show how emotional intelligence helps us determine the appropriate leadership style and how we can grow our emotional intelligence.

Soft skill development is crucial as a separator between success and failure as your career progresses. Sadly, some skills (such as conflict resolution, hiring/firing, or negotiation) can only be practiced “in the moment”, and unless your job is fraught with these types of situations, you may not advance your skills in these areas as fast as needed.

This course focuses on providing fun, repeatable activities that help improve these “hard to train” skill sets. Each one creates a safe, repeatable situation where each player can try, fail, and learn. Along with the activities, we’ll take a look at the core behavioral patterns for these soft skills and introduce connections between the activities, how the circumstances change, and how this relates to your career and goals.

Along with all the lecture, attendees will walk away with copies of the games so that they can facilitate them with their own teams at work.

Day 1: Intros and The Chaos of Teamwork

The “Too Many Droids” activity helps immerse the team in highly stressful, simulated chaos to accomplish personal activities and help the team accomplish its goals. In this activity players will realize that their strategies for “getting things done” falls apart once the stakes get high enough. As a team they will have to come together, develop a plan for communication, resource sharing, and what to do when things go from bad, to worse.

Day 2: Stress, Triage and Better Teamwork

“Unicorn or Bust!” is an activity that builds resilience against the day-to-day chaos of projects & problems. In this activity players take the role of a new startup company trying to go 52 weeks from startup to IPO. Along the way, the team will have to share resources, agree on strategy, and try to solve problems before they run out of funding... or worse!

Day 3: Communicating with Empathy and Intention

“Ship it!” is an activity that helps develop empathetic communication. In this activity, players will quickly have to realize that their team members don’t share the same mental model about how the game should be played, and will have to take it upon themselves to modify their communication process. Giving the wrong information, worded in the wrong way, could spell disaster!

Day 4: Dealing with Transitions

“Re-org” activity that helps players move through planning their impact- focused work, while dealing with unexpected consequences from an administrative level. Your goal is to become the most valuable engineer at your company, which you do by taking on and completing projects. The problem? Every year a re-org happens, and you’ve got a new manager who changes the company priorities. Learn how to adapt to chaos in the workplace, changing design requirements, and how to build a career that can withstand any re-org.

Day 5: Putting it all Together

Day 5 brings an activity that binds together all of the lessons of the week into a single exercise. “Favortown” is a collaborative card game that focuses on hyper-restricted communication to accomplish a shared goal – The team is tasked with accomplishing a set of large goals, where each team member has a unique skill that’s required to solve the problems. The trick? No talking allowed. Teams will use all the skills from this week to plan, negotiate, deal with problems, empathize and deal with the chaos of day-to-day problems, all in 10 minutes at a time.

Using a question or making a statement to open a Safe Space for you and your conversational partners to make better decisions. Asking the Right Questions has the following characteristics:

• It gets people to pause and think.
• It often leads to an ‘aha moment.’
• It is focused on getting to an Ideal Final Result.

Asking the Right Questions is very simple. Use a question, make a statement, or use one of the models we’ve defined to open a space for your conversational partners to make better decisions in reaching each ideal final result. By Asking the Right Questions, you not only create a more positive perception of you, team members are more able and willing to implement a joint vision and do it happily. Finally, by asking questions that change the perception that others have of you, you will be more readily able to turn conflict into positive outcomes. Mr. Lam will show you how these life-changing methods actually work and how they can provide a framework for implementing the other skills you learn at TMP. 

In today’s world of ever-expanding Big Data and AI adoption, organizations are investing heavily in analytics to drive smarter decisions. Yet, a persistent obstacle remains: the “language barrier” between data professionals and business stakeholders.

Frontline managers often struggle to clearly articulate their insights, while executives may feel overwhelmed by technical complexity—creating a communication gap that limits the real-world impact of analytics. Bridging this divide is essential to building a data-driven culture and unlocking the full potential of your organization's information assets.

In this workshop, you'll gain actionable strategies to communicate data more effectively, influence decision-makers, and immediately apply what you learn to your work!

Learning Outcomes

I. Data-Driven Persuasion

• Understand why storytelling is essential for making data-driven insights resonate.
• Focus your analysis on answering the “$o What” question—ensuring every insight serves a clear business purpose.

II. Audience Awareness

• Learn to tailor your message to for technical teams, business users, and executive leadership.
• Break down silos by fostering internal data partnerships and cross-functional collaboration.

III. Maximizing Data's Potential

• Apply proven visualization best practices to avoid information overload.
• Strengthen your analysis with high-quality data, sound data governance, and the appropriate machine learning tools.

IV. Communicate to Influence

• Sharpen executive writing and presentation skills to build trust and credibility.
• Use scenario planning and the “less is more” approach to deliver focused, forward-looking insights.

V. Experiential Application

• Participate in interactive workshops to practice, receive feedback, and reflect on real-world projects.
• Apply newly learned storytelling techniques to a current project (with sensitive data masked), or select a topic/dataset of your choosing for a class presentation.