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.

This course provides participants and those aspiring to become a manager, or who have recently been promoted, with the skills and knowledge to become a highly successful organizational leader. The course begins by assessing participants’ current leadership capabilities and shows them how to “build on their strengths” to hone in and focus on the talents they already possess into powerful managerial skills. This course shows students how to set and clearly communicate goals for their organizations, build strong teams, nurture collaboration, guide the efforts of individuals and groups to perform at the highest levels, and focus and motivate their employees to successfully achieve the organization’s goals.

Specific skills are:

• Defining your leadership vision and values
• How to organize your staff and assign responsibility and accountability.
• Building an effective hybrid workforce.
• Identify the four basic communication styles.
• How to run an effective meeting.
• Managing dysfunctional staff.
• Cultivate employee engagement and motivation.
• Building and showing your department’s value and worth to your organization.
• Develop and pitch a new and innovative product or service to management.
• Exciting roleplay exercises that include task delegation, meeting facilitation, and holding a difficult one-on-one discussion with an employee.

Day 1
Introduction to the course and Leadership Styles, Vision, and Values
a. Introduction and what to expect from this course
b. Review of syllabus and daily agenda
c. What is leadership?
d. 4 Basic leadership Styles
e. What skills do you already have?
f. What skills do you need?
g. What makes a great leader?
h. Review various political, civil, spiritual, business, and scientific leaders.
i. Exercise: Establishing your leadership vision and values

Day 2
Organizational Management, Engagement and Motivation
a. 3 Levels of Management
b. Office politics, competition, and your position
c. Origination and Realities of your new management position.
d. Staffing and skillsets
e. Exercise: Assign and RACI matrix
f. Employee Engagement
g. Motivation and Influence
h. Hybrid Workforce
i. Motivating the team and staff
j. The surprising truth about what motivates us.
k. Case Study: Motivation

Day 3
Communication Styles and Task Delegation
a. Communication & personality traits
b. Review the Thinker, Director, Socializer, and Relator
c. Red-zone behaviors
d. Self-Assessment Exercise: Which communication style are you?
e. Developing team synergy
f. Earning and fostering trust
g. Sharing a vision with your department
h. Active listening
i. How to effectively delegate
j. Role Playing Exercise: Practice Delegation

Day 4
Performance reviews and meeting facilitation
a. The performance appraisals
b. Soft skills and difficult employee conversations
c. Role Play Exercise: Correcting poor performance.
d. How to run an effective meeting.
e. Typical meeting roles
f. Meeting mechanics
g. Zoom calls
h. Meeting dysfunction
i. Meeting close and next steps
j. Role Play Exercise: Running a Great Meeting

Day 5
Department value and develop an innovative product proposal
a. Managing in Difficult Times.
b. Inverted yield curve
c. Showing Value and working on the right projects
d. KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
e. Financial and project metrics
f. Being visible not invisible
g. Create a brand
h. Managing ambiguity
i. Entrepreneurial spirit
j. Exercise: Develop an innovative product and pitch the idea to the instructor

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).