Program Participants in Classroom

Curriculum

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.

Program Highlights

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.

Leveraging Compositional Advantage: Solve the Murder Mystery

Take part in a live simulation that challenges your strategic abilities to leverage teamwork and information sharing to accomplish a stated goal. The team discussions will be captured on video, allowing groups to analyze their own performance during the debriefing session.

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.

Influencing Without Authority

The ability to exert influence without relying on the power of a formal title can often be critical to effective management. In this session, we will analyze strategies and tactics that will help you influence others when you lack formal authority.

Contact

Jana Dubovska | Executive Education, Stanford GSB
Associate Director, Programs Executive Education