Day 1
Morning Session
[COLLABORATION] Understanding the Dynamics of Team Synergy
After this session, you’ll understand the key processes and structures that lead some teams to perform better than others. You’ll pay close attention to the interpersonal skills that allow leaders to identify and leverage the hidden expertise in their teams, such as building trust. By participating in a team simulation exercise, you’ll receive individualized and team-based feedback, and leave with specific actions you can take to improve your performance as a team member and team leader.
Afternoon Sessions
[COLLABORATION] Developing Efficient Team Strategies
In this session, you will learn about the structures and norms that allow teams to achieve process gains and avoid process losses. Specifically, you’ll analyze how teams can use planning and coordination to avoid common problems that result from overspecialization and conceptual blocking. By taking part in a team exercise where you experience these dynamics playing out, you will have the opportunity to analyze your strengths and weaknesses in implementing such group norms.
[ENGAGEMENT] Leadership Mindset
Overconfidence and self-deception cause people to fall short of their own standards and values. Such biases are common mental traps that cause good people to do bad things and smart people to do dumb things. We will discuss what causes overconfidence and how to avoid it. We will end by discussing how to engage in perspective-taking and how to properly calibrate confidence in ourselves and those we lead.
Day 2
Morning Session
[COLLABORATION] Enhancing Collaborative Value
In this session, participants will pair off and negotiate a contract. We will reveal what the most efficient contracts look like in an ideal world and then give hints about how to reach such contracts in real life. We will discuss how one can lay the groundwork for collaboration, especially when the other side will not easily give up information, e.g., how do you get information from the other side?
Afternoon Sessions
[COMMUNICATION] Communicating Vision and Intent: “Leader's Intent” or the “What” and “Why”
In this session, you will examine the importance and utility of communicating intent two levels up, two levels down, and across lateral units. You’ll apply the steps for creating and communicating the “leaders intent,” and the related confirmation and back-briefing techniques, for one of your own leadership situations. Finish this session in small-group discussions about how to create alignment and initiative in your organization, while preventing micromanagement.
[COMMUNICATION] Leading Hard Conversations to Build Awareness and Action
Learn the army's After-Action Review method of team feedback to encourage and sustain the voices of those with diverse experiences, and how to communicate in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environments. You’ll conclude with an exercise about assessing and discussing individual, team, and organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT).
Day 3
Morning Session
[ACCOUNTABILITY & LISTENING] Being an Accountable Manager
Thriving as an organization in the 21st century marketplace demands an unprecedented level of leadership capacity and execution. This requires personal accountability with a focus on learning and leading by example. In this session, you will reflect on the week’s lessons to distill what you've learned into your own approach for holding yourself accountable in your managerial approach. You’ll share your ideas, and solicit and deliver feedback with fellow participants.
Afternoon Session
[ENGAGEMENT] Motivation and Nonmonetary Incentives
In this session, we will consider the strengths and weaknesses of different ways of measuring and rewarding performance, and we will discuss non-monetary compensation as an important lever in HR management. You’ll also examine the psychological research on incentives and motivation. Specifically, we will focus on the circumstances under which monetary reward systems can have unanticipated and dysfunctional effects, the underlying psychological factors that may lead monetary incentives to reduce performance, and the strategies that managers can utilize to increase intrinsic motivation.
[ENGAGEMENT] Aligning Tasks and Incentives
This session focuses on the importance of aligning organizational incentives with the design of jobs. Employees’ decisions about whether to support organizational goals obviously depend on the tangible and intangible rewards that they perceive. How a job is designed will affect the “costs,” or the difficulties the job incumbent experiences in trying to realize those rewards, as well as the ease and precision with which successful performance can be assessed. Accordingly, you cannot think about incentives independently of how tasks are assigned to particular organizational roles.
Day 4
Morning Session
[ACCOUNTABILITY & LISTENING] Understanding and Developing Emotional Intelligence
Emotions can either hurt us or help us. One eye roll can cost a relationship, a sale, or even a career. Whether you’re on the delivering end or the receiving end, unchecked emotions can wreak havoc on our personal and professional lives. This session will focus on evidence-based tools that can be used to enhance emotional intelligence, including your ability to develop greater accuracy at reading emotions and effectively regulating emotions to achieve greater outcomes.
