What is the smartest way to build an effective team? How can you ensure that dissenting opinions will be heard? How do you make teamwork exhilarating rather than exasperating?

Managing Teams for Innovation and Success combines a rigorous curriculum, team-based simulations, and design thinking principles to bring greater innovation and success to your teams and your organization.

Below is just a sample of the sessions you’ll experience as part of the program.

The Dynamics of Diversity in Teams

Diversity provides tremendous informational and problem-solving advantages in teams, but only if the interactional dynamics of the team don’t prevent that potential from being realized. This case discussion will identify the primary impediments to effective information sharing in diverse teams, and how to address those impediments. This will be a continuation of the previous session with discussion of the cases that have been prepared.

Design Thinking to Drive Innovation

These sessions provide a provocative, experiential, and practical approach to leading innovation. The focus is on developing innovators (versus innovations), so your primary work will be to develop your team members’ capacity to innovate.

The first session exposes you to the principles of human-centered design and leads to a conversation about disrupting the managerial status quo, amplifying your organization’s strengths, and addressing some key weaknesses. In the second session, you’ll use a design thinking framework to tackle a hands-on team innovation challenge from start to finish.

The Future of Working from Home

Discover what the current state of working from home is in the US and internationally, and how it varies by job type, industry, employee age, gender and over time. We will also describe the data and research showing why this hybrid WFH has become so popular.

Fully remote is a more extreme version of WFH which has some major benefits in avoiding office costs and enabling national (or global) hiring, but has some potentially large productivity and training drawbacks. We will discuss some of the key steps for management of WFH, particularly hybrid WFH which is challenging to implement. Finally, we will discuss some of the impacts of WFH on the economy, including the “donut effect” and the “golf effect”, finishing with the “Nike swoosh” future prediction for WFH in 5+ years.

Managing Team Interactions: Synergy and Process Loss

In this session, we will use the context of a group decision-making task to explore the ways in which team members can make their voices heard. In addition, we will identify strategies for structuring teams to improve members’ ability to hear and incorporate divergent and minority opinions.

Teaming Across Boundaries: Global Teams

In this session, participants explore team dynamics that result from cultural differences, unpack the underlying causes of tension, and discuss how to structure and lead these teams to achieve their full potential.