TMP Course Descriptions: Period 3

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. 

This Positive Leadership course is designed to equip participants with essential skills and insights to create a healthy and productive workplace culture. The program explores the intricate balance between personal needs, the needs of team members, and the overarching needs of the business.

Beginning with the foundational concept of ""Fueling Your Own Tank,"" participants delve into strategies for increasing personal vitality and professional engagement, including aligning with values, savoring positive experiences, cultivating gratitude, and understanding the importance of achieving a balance in giving to oneself and to others. The course then expands into the realm of emotional literacy, emphasizing self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social skills to enhance relationships.

The importance of feedback is highlighted in the context of personal and professional growth, fostering a culture that embraces constructive feedback, a growth mindset, and continuous professional development. The course also delves into the synergy between individual strengths, team dynamics, and organizational success.

Participants engage in practical applications of positive leadership principles through final presentations, demonstrating their ability to integrate personal, interpersonal, and organizational needs for a holistic and positive work environment. By the course's conclusion, participants are poised to apply positive leadership practices that contribute to individual well-being, cohesive team dynamics, and sustained business success.

Upon completing the Positive Leadership course, learners will:

1. Enhance Personal Vitality and Happiness:

• Identify and align personal values, fostering a sense of fulfillment.
• Implement strategies for savoring positive experiences and cultivating gratitude.
• Recognize the importance of balance in self-giving and contributions to others.

2. Elevate Emotional Literacy:

• Develop self-awareness to understand and manage personal emotions effectively.
• Implement enhanced self-regulation strategies
• Cultivate empathy and refine social skills for stronger interpersonal relationships.

3. Foster an Open Feedback Culture:

• Acknowledge the value of constructive feedback for personal and professional growth.
• Embrace a growth mindset that views challenges as opportunities for learning.
• Engage in continuous professional development to adapt to changing workplace demands.

4. Apply Positive Leadership Principles:

• Demonstrate the integration of personal, interpersonal, and organizational needs.
• Showcase practical applications through final presentations.
• Develop a holistic leadership approach contributing to individual well-being, cohesive team dynamics, and sustained business success.

Ubiquitous digital transformation technologies such as robotics, generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, large language models (LLMs), and other digital applications automate both mechanistic and creative work processes, which represent potential advancements never imagined a decade ago. Yet many view digital transformation as not only redefining the experience of work, but also undermining the humanity of organizations. 

Employees across the spectrum of skill-levels, job classes, and wages also face unprecedented and existential threats to their sense of self-worth, value, and esteem, which collectively embody dignity. Given the onslaught of these technological advances and digital transformation initiatives across industries and sectors, leaders need a set of practical strategies that both protect employees from threats to their dignity as well as proactively cultivate the experience of dignity in their organizations. 

To meet this growing need, this course presents executives, management teams, HR professionals, and other leaders with evidence-based approaches for protecting and promoting the experience of dignity at work. Grounded in the latest thinking and research on dignity in the workplace, this topic explains practical strategies for investing in protective mechanisms (policies and processes) that insulate employees from aspects of work that erode the experience of dignity, as well as proactive mechanisms (practices and behaviors) that cultivate meaningful opportunities to experience dignity at work.