Our goal for the program is to return you to the office with a set of practical, vetted tools and action plans you can put to use immediately, to bring your colleagues along with you in your pursuit of excellence and growth. The following are session descriptions for our four-day program:
Understanding your challenges as a manager
You will begin the program with faculty director Dr. Homa Bahrami—an award-winning teacher, author, researcher, and industry consultant, with decades of directly applicable experience making leaders and their organizations better at what they do. In this session, Dr. Bahrami will begin with a large picture framework of culture, organization structure, and firm strategy to provide a context for the program and for the results of your personalized pre-program survey. You will also have the opportunity to reflect on, and define, your personal challenges as a manager. We will use a small group breakout format to reflect on challenges faced by you and your colleagues, and to share best practices for addressing those challenges. We will use the outcome of this session to ensure that we address your unique (and shared) management challenges throughout the program.
Succeeding in a dynamic organization
In this session, Dr. Bahrami will dig deeper into her research on effective dynamic organizations, offering a suite of straightforward tools to improve performance. Topics include team size and composition, accountabilities, and coordination; leadership practices, role models and clarity on the ground rules; formal and informal interaction balancing, “front-line” feedback channels, and personnel rotations, mobility and re-deployment. Through her uncanny knack for simplification and clarity, Dr. Bahrami will make sure you are able to apply these tools directly to your own challenges.
The leader as coach
Effective coaching is one of the most important and stressful tasks managers at every level experience. In this workshop, led by Dr. Mark Rittenberg, you will practice the necessary skills to become an effective coach for the people you lead, able to recognize and develop the full potential of your employees. The format is to practice in small groups, with plenty of direct, candid feedback on your performance. The session will make you a more confident and competent coach and leader.
Determining your team opportunities: Diagnostic survey results
Dr. Bahrami’s survey will be conducted prior to the program, to get baseline data for the anatomy (structure), personality (culture), and circulation (interactions) of your organization. In this session, you will develop a personal answer to the question: how do you create a robust, resilient, adaptable, and innovative organization? Traditional thinking has centered on creating stability and routine—doing what you did yesterday. That context has shifted quickly, with accelerating innovation and rapidly shifting consumer preferences. Organizations have had to learn to transform themselves multiple times, adapt quickly, and adjust on the fly. In this session, you will develop a plan to create an organization that will embrace uncertainty, unlock innovation, and seize opportunities for growth.
Super flexible teams
Each management situation presents unique challenges, whether you built your team or inherited it. In this session you will learn how to make your team as effective as possible, especially when faced with a dynamic and evolving organizational situation. Profiles of effective and ineffective teams will be shown to study common team challenges and pain points. Led by Dr. Bahrami, you will learn how to organize and lead multi-cultural, geographically distributed teams, armed with critical actions steps that can keep your team aligned and productive.
Effective influence and persuasion
In this session, you will receive direct video feedback of your performance in a simulated negotiation. Through self and peer evaluation, and by viewing yourself in the video, you will get unfiltered feedback on your perceived credibility, strength, trustworthiness, likeability, and openness to others’ input—the keys to influence. You will be debriefed by Cameron Anderson, a leading expert on topics pertaining to power, status, and influence processes; leadership; negotiations and conflict resolution; and team dynamics.
Influencing people and leading change simulation
You will participate in a change management simulation that lets you and a small team practice implementing a major change initiative in a simulated organization, experiencing many different types of resistance. The simulation provides a visceral and inexpensive lesson in the many traps and tactical misfires that typify any change initiative. The session will provide you with a well-structured thought process to go through when you want to implement changes in your own organization, whether they are minor changes, or major projects.
How to attract, develop, motivate, and retain talent
In this session, we will focus on creating a healthy fit between your organization and the people in it—key to achieving your objectives and maximizing the engagement and energy of the people you lead. We will investigate how to create high performance through recruiting and selecting candidates who will thrive, training and socializing your employees so they are set up for success, and recognizing and rewarding the right things that will reinforce what you are trying to achieve, rather than undermine it.
Experimental innovation
“Little bets” are concrete actions taken to discover, test, and develop ideas that are achievable and affordable. They begin as creative possibilities that are tested and refined in multiple iterations over time. They are particularly valuable when trying to navigate amid uncertainty, create something new, or solve open-ended problems. Many successful entrepreneurs and companies don’t begin with brilliant ideas—they discover and refine them. This workshop demonstrates how the process (from idea generation to prototyping to evaluation) can lead to breakthroughs. Participants learn the conceptual framework for little bets, examine several examples of organizations that have adopted the little bets approach, and then apply the concepts to the real challenges facing their organizations.
