Key Information
About the content
In this course, you will learn how to build your team, improve teamwork and collaboration, and sustain team performance through continuous learning and improvement. Specifically, you will learn best practices for composing a team and aligning individual and team goals. You will also learn how to establish roles, build structures, and manage decision making so that your team excels. This course will also help you manage critical team processes such as conflict resolution and building trust that have a profound impact on your team’s performance. You will discuss some of the best ways to harness the productive potential of teams while mitigating the risks and traps of teamwork. In modern organization, most of work is done in teams, yet the results of teamwork are exceptionally mixed. Many teams are poorly designed and structured, fraught with dysfunctional conflict, experience coordination breakdowns and serious motivation challenges. As a result, many teams fail to realize their potential and frequently underperform even individuals working on similar tasks. After completing this course, you will acquire a set of tools and practices that enable you to effectively set up, run, evaluate, and continuously improve your team. Such insights will both make you a more effective team leader but also a standout contributor in team settings.
Syllabus
WEEK 1 : 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.
WEEK 2 : 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.
WEEK 3 : 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.
WEEK 4 : 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.
Instructors
Scott DeRue, Ph.D.
Edward J. Frey Dean at the Ross School of Business
Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business
Maxim Sytch, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Management and Organizations Michael R. and Mary Kay Hallman Fellow
Management and Organizations, Ross School of Business
Content Designer
Platform
Coursera is a digital company offering massive open online course founded by computer teachers Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller Stanford University, located in Mountain View, California.
Coursera works with top universities and organizations to make some of their courses available online, and offers courses in many subjects, including: physics, engineering, humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science, digital marketing, data science, and other subjects.
Insightful course to help you to improve strategies and be aware of team dynamics. Thanks for sharing such valuable course.
I am blown away by the usefulness of the content and the quality of the lessons in this and the other courses of the specialization. Scott and Maxim are incredibly knowledgeable and really gifted teachers! I have learned so much through these courses that the way I approach managing and leading people and teams and even just the way I approach being a team member will be forever changed in better because of it!!
This course was introduced to me by a friend and i am really learning alot.The knowledge gained in this course would further enhance my leadership skills.
This is one of those courses which is dense in information and make you not only reflect but also to evaluate if my team is size and structure in a right one, what formal and informal roles my team members have, am I evaluating and rewarding my team in a right way, how to make conflicts a positive thing supporting learning and creativity, does my team diverse enough to achieve our vision and goals? Great great course! Highly recommend!
