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.

In this highly interactive class, you will develop actionable strategies for building your brand as an inclusive leader, learn effective approaches for addressing the dynamics that undermine engagement and inclusion in many STEM environments, and build the skills you’ll need to lead the cultural changes that foster retention and top team performance while enabling all employees to thrive.

Leading in the 21st century is characterized by several challenges that result from highly disruptive market conditions and a rapidly changing workforce. The days when managers primarily control output and resources are behind us; and a new leadership mandate is in place that requires leaders to be inclusive, adaptive, flexible, empathetic, and fair to attract and retain top talent. Achieving this mandate is particularly challenging in STEM industries, which have been observed to operate in ways that are non-inclusive and inhospitable to people in underrepresented groups.

But there is good news for leaders: those who develop the skills and cultures that foster inclusion and engagement will create more positive environments, stronger collaboration, and better performance and retention outcomes with less effort. In this course, you will learn how to achieve these outcomes through applying the principles of strengths-based leadership, positive organizational scholarship, and emotionally intelligent leadership in environments that are psychologically safe, all while discovering how to bring your most authentic leadership brand to life in ways that encourage high employee engagement and inclusion.

Topics include:

• What effective leadership looks like in the era of DEI, marketplace disruption, and workforce disengagement
• Learning your top strengths and how to channel them toward building an authentic leadership brand that engages your team(s)
• Developing skills for leading yourself and others using the principles of growth mindset and strengths-based leadership
• Understanding how to cultivate high emotional intelligence to create stronger connections with your team(s)
• Learning effective strategies for leveling the playing field for underrepresented groups
• Developing the skills and strategies needed to lead effective culture change.

With the relentless proliferation and complexity of Big Data being generated today, organizations are increasingly investing in the power of AI to make information more accessible and impactful. However, a significant challenge in cultivating a data-driven culture is the 'language barrier' between stakeholders and data teams. Frontline managers and individual contributors often find it difficult to clearly articulate their findings and may not fully grasp the business processes they aim to optimize. At the same time, leadership can feel overwhelmed by the mathematical complexities, hindering their ability to express needs in a way that can be effectively modeled. To uncover the true potential of their data and drive meaningful impact, companies must bridge this growing gap between data overload and business application. Attendees will leave with actionable data communication strategies they can implement in their workplaces starting next week!

Learning Outcomes:

Data-Driven Persuasion

• Understand the significance of data storytelling for effectively communicating insights and ensuring that data analysis aligns with business needs.
• Emphasize the punchline and answering the “$o What” question in all analyses and presentations.

Audience Awareness

• Acknowledge the importance of tailoring narratives to address the unique needs and expectations of various audiences, both technical and non-technical.
• Convey complex information to business stakeholders, foster internal data partnerships, and break down departmental silos to expand the influence of analysis results. 

Maximizing Data's Potential

• Utilize effective visualization techniques and best practices to create clear charts and graphics, avoiding analysis paralysis with excessive charting options or information overload.
• Reinforce the significance of data quality, maintaining data integrity, and leveraging the correct Machine Learning algorithms. 

Communicate to Influence

• Improve presentation and executive writing skills to engage audiences, build trust with peers and decision-makers, and enhance active listening.
• Influence upwards by sharing actionable in$ight$, proactively conduct future scenario analyses, and effectively apply “less is more” strategy.

Experiential Application

• Acquire invaluable practice and feedback through interactive workshops, coupled with self-reflection on recent projects to identify successes and areas for improvement.
• Apply and present newly learned data storytelling strategies to an upcoming work project (ensuring that confidential data is appropriately masked).

This course offers participants a fun, experiential, and highly interactive learning experience that focuses on the development of agile leadership competencies. The course participants will complete the LEAP (Learning, Engaging, Adapting, Persevering) leadership assessment, a validated instrument that measures 20 agile leadership competencies. Examples of agile leadership competencies include strategic insight, innovating thinking, cultivating psychological safety, collaboration skills, and emotional intelligence. The assessment results and key take-aways from each class session will be used to develop a five-part Leadership Development Plan (LDP). The LDP allows participants an opportunity to clearly articulate how they will transfer their learning from the course (and from the TMP more broadly) to the leadership challenges in their job and organizational context. Course participants are offered a series of practical tools, resources, and readings to support the development of their LDPs, including practical strategies and tactics for enhancing all 20 agile leadership competencies.

Participants are encouraged to share the course tools, resources, and exercises with their own teams at work. These resources include the experiential exercises, leadership development tools, leadership development briefs (digital archive of practitioner-focused articles across all 20 leadership competencies), and discussion guides. Outlined below, each of the five course sessions feature experiential learning activities (role-plays, team simulations, etc.) that are designed for participants to develop agile leadership competencies.

Day 1: VUCA Megatrends & Agile Leadership Competencies

Our first session includes an interactive discussion of the VUCA megatrends driving the need for more agile leadership and the implications for emerging business leaders. We focus on how the digital transformation, generational shifts, and other VUCA drivers influence how leaders must engage their teams. Our first session features a fun, highly interactive team-based experiential exercise (the marshmallow challenge) that illustrates the challenges of leading in VUCA environments, and the practical implications for developing leader agility.

Day 2: LEAP Assessment & Emotional Intelligence

Our second session includes the completion of the LEAP (Learning, Engaging, Adapting, Persevering) leadership assessment, and a discussion of how to interpret and apply the results to your Leadership Development Plan (LDP). We discuss all 20 leadership competencies, and how organizations utilize assessments as part of talent review processes (nine-box grids and related succession planning activities). Our second session features an engaging experiential exercise (‘Assigned Leader Group Exercise’) that challenges the participants to build consensus and leverage the experiences and expertise of each team member. This highly interactive and practical exercise allows all participants to reflect upon their LEAP assessment results and develop initial priorities for further development across one or more agile leadership competencies.

Day 3: Building Collaboration Skills & Cultivating Psychological Safety

Our third session focuses on the development of two core agile leadership competencies, specifically collaboration skills and the ability to cultivate psychological safety. We will discuss the five trademarks of agile organizations and examples of leadership agility across organizations (the participants’ organizations as well as Google, Netflix, Nike, and other organizations), and across modalities (face-to-face and virtual context). This session features a series of role-playing exercises in which participants further develop their collaboration skills and ability cultivating psychological safety on work teams.

Day 4: Coaching & Developing Talent

Our fourth session focuses on the development of coaching and talent development skills, which represent essential agile leadership competencies. Participants will engage in interactive discussions and exercises around how agile leadership requires both feedback-giving and feedback-seeking skills. Participants are provided a concise, practical coaching model that includes four phases of a highly effective coaching session and practical strategies for giving and receiving feedback. This session features a series of role-playing exercises in which participants practice applying the coaching model to three coaching challenges that are common for emerging leaders with technical backgrounds.

Day 5: Leader Authenticity & Your Leadership Development Plan (LDP)

The final session focuses on the completion of the Leadership Development Plan (LDP), which includes a targeted action plan for enhancing three leadership competencies that are associated with your current or future job challenges. Participants are provided a list of suggested development strategies and tactics for all 20 agile leadership competencies. This session includes an interactive discussion of leader authenticity, and the importance of reflecting upon your core values and leadership principles as the foundation of your LDP. The session concludes with an engaging and practical discussion of how participants will leverage all of the learnings from their TMP experience for their LDPs and share with their teams at work.