TMP Course Descriptions: Period 3

Soft skill development is crucial as a separator between success and failure as your career progresses. Sadly, some skills (such as conflict resolution, hiring/firing, or negotiation) can only be practiced “in the moment”, and unless your job is fraught with these types of situations, you may not advance your skills in these areas as fast as needed.

This course focuses on providing fun, repeatable activities that help improve these “hard to train” skill sets. Each one creates a safe, repeatable situation where each player can try, fail, and learn. Along with the activities, we’ll take a look at the core behavioral patterns for these soft skills and introduce connections between the activities, how the circumstances change, and how this relates to your career and goals.

Along with all the lecture, attendees will walk away with copies of the games so that they can facilitate them with their own teams at work.

Day 1: Intros and The Chaos of Teamwork
The “Too Many Droids” activity helps immerse the team in highly stressful, simulated chaos to accomplish personal activities and help the team accomplish its goals. In this activity, players will realize that their strategies for “getting things done” fall apart once the stakes get high enough. As a team, they will have to come together, develop a plan for communication, resource sharing, and what to do when things go from bad, to worse.

Day 2: Stress, Triage, and Better Teamwork
“Unicorn or Bust!” is an activity that builds resilience against the day-to-day chaos of projects & problems. In this activity, players take the role of a new startup company trying to go 52 weeks from startup to IPO. Along the way, the team will have to share resources, agree on a strategy, and try to solve problems before they run out of funding... or worse!

Day 3: Communicating with Empathy and Intention
“Ship it!” is an activity that helps develop empathetic communication. In this activity, players will quickly have to realize that their team members don’t share the same mental model about how the game should be played, and will have to take it upon themselves to modify their communication process. Giving the wrong information, worded in the wrong way, could spell disaster!

Day 4: Dealing with Transitions
“Re-org” activity that helps players move through planning their impact-focused work while dealing with unexpected consequences from an administrative level. Your goal is to become the most valuable engineer at your company, which you do by taking on and completing projects. The problem? Every year a re-org happens, and you’ve got a new manager who changes the company priorities. Learn how to adapt to chaos in the workplace, change design requirements, and how to build a career that can withstand any re-org.

Day 5: Putting it all together
Day 5 brings an activity that binds together all of the lessons of the week into a single exercise. “Favortown” is a collaborative card game that focuses on hyper-restricted communication to accomplish a shared goal – The team is tasked with accomplishing a set of large goals, where each team member has a unique skill that’s required to solve the problems. The trick? No talking allowed. Teams will use all the skills from this week to plan, negotiate, deal with problems, empathize and deal with the chaos of day-to-day problems, all in 10 minutes at a time.

Using a question or making a statement to open a Safe Space for you and your conversational partners to make better decisions. Asking the Right Questions has the following characteristics:

• It gets people to pause and think.
• It often leads to an ‘aha moment.’
• It is focused on getting to an Ideal Final Result.

Asking the Right Questions is very simple. Use a question, make a statement, or use one of the models we’ve defined to open a space for your conversational partners to make better decisions in reaching each ideal final result. By Asking the Right Questions, you not only create a more positive perception of you, team members are more able and willing to implement a joint vision and do it happily. Finally, by asking questions that change the perception that others have of you, you will be more readily able to turn conflict into positive outcomes. Mr. Lam will show you how these life-changing methods actually work and how they can provide a framework for implementing the other skills you learn at TMP. 

Being technically exceptional is only half the responsibility of being a great leader. One of the key qualities of a highly effective leader is maximizing the performance of their team and each individual they lead.

Understanding and utilizing a variety of positive practices can have a direct impact on leaders, team members and organizations reaching their potential.

Discover how you as a leader can elevate the employee experience, maximize productivity, and build effectiveness, while strengthening team cohesion. This course will walk you through practical tools that will not only benefit your team, but also strengthen your own awareness and problem-solving skills, while developing effective working relationships.

Among the many trends directly impacting the requisite skills and competencies for today’s leadership, four megatrends are paramount for shaping how current and future leaders should focus their personal development:

• The digital transformational, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation
• The multi-generational workforce and socio-demographic shifts
• COVID-19, climate change, and the likelihood of future extreme events
• The changing nature of work and organizations, particularly the advance of digital technologies and work-from-home policies accelerated via the pandemic.

Within the incredibly turbulent and complex context of these forces, leaders must focus their personal development on the most important competencies for driving organizational success.

Students in this course will examine the specific leadership competencies that are most effective in VUCA organizational contexts. These leadership skills and behaviors are captured in the Strategic Leadership Competency Model, which includes 20 competencies across four pillars: Driving Results (strategic insight, innovative thinking, maintaining focus on strategic priorities, results-orientation, and understanding the business; Engaging Stakeholders (collaboration skills, communication skills, interpersonal skills, conflict management skills, and mission/values/purpose-driven); Leading Change (inspires others, leads organizational change, leader agility, performance feedback, and coaching, develops talent); and Leading Self (exhibits self-awareness, seeks feedback, work/life balance, integrity, emotional intelligence).

In addition to exploring the megatrends and their impact on workforce outcomes and business performance—such as new product and service innovations, the great resignation, and virtual work teams—students will complete the following:

• Develop and articulate an individual philosophy of leadership that reflects one’s personal values and leadership principles
• Create a leadership development plan that outlines actions/tactics for enhancing competencies across four levels of leadership influence (leading self, leading teams, leading strategy, and leading change
• Engage with fellow students in experiential activities (role-playing, simulations, and assessments) designed to generate greater insights on one's leadership strengths and development opportunities.