This course introduces team leaders and team coaches to fundamentally new ways of understanding the nature and behavior of teams, with the goal of re-shaping team dynamics. In the course, two main processes are distinguished: interpersonal and task process. Their balance is thought to define team maturity.
The purpose of the course is twofold: to change coaches’ perception of teams based on social-emotional insight, and to give them new, dialectical, dialog tools for supporting team members’ interpersonal process and for strengthening their task process. Team maturity and different modes of team leadership are central course topics.
The methodology taught goes far beyond purely the behavioral approaches now used, focusing on team members’ developmentally shaped frame of reference on account of which they collaborate in the team and view the organization they art part of the way they do.
Students will be asked to submit a concise description of a team they are working with; their descriptions will provide the focus around which CDF tools are introduced and practiced in class. The study cohort itself will serve as a team to practice on.
