Leading Teams in University of Michigan

Designing Your Team for Excellence

As a team leader, you must determine how best to compose and structure your team. You will need to determine the optimal team size, diversity of team members, values, and goals for the team -- all of which will have a big impact on team dynamics and performance. In this module, you will learn strategies and tactics to design your team effectively.

Structuring Your Team for Excellence

In the first module of the course, we discussed your role as a team leader in designing your team's size, composition, diversity of personalities and values, and goals. In addition, you must determine how best to structure your team, specifically how you will structure decision making, rewards, and roles. You must also ensure the team has a clear set of norms that guide its behavior. In this module, you will learn strategies and tactics to structure your team effectively.

Managing Team Dynamics

It is common to see teams working on identical tasks and having similar access to organizational resources and talent produce systematically different performance outcomes. This occurs because we mismanage team processes, or how teammates work on the task and interact with one another during teamwork. In this module, you will learn how to recognize most typically process hurdles in teamwork and how to overcome them, thus creating high-performing teams.

Creating Sustainable Team Performance and Learning

This module is focused on creating sustainable levels of high-performance in teams. In this module you will therefore learn how to evaluate team performance and how to ensure this high performance is sustainable in your teams. Relatedly, we will discuss how to ensure team learning and effective flow of new ideas in your teams.