Behind the success and failure of teams lies team culture. But what exactly is culture? How and why does it contribute to success and failure? In this course, you learn how to recognize aspects of team culture of which most people are typically unaware. It is often these seemingly unimportant aspects that have the greatest effect on the outcomes of group tasks. Your recognition of them enables you to form, join and lead teams more effectively. You also come to appreciate the role of ritual and symbols in the daily operation of teams, as well as in situations of change and crisis. Knowledge of the ideas and information in this class enables you to be a better team player and a more effective team leader.

Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course helps you understand the problems that hurt productivity, and gives you tools for creating positive change. This course also guides you through creating the ground rules and structure needed to set your team up for success. You gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

By drawing on social science perspectives, this course enables you to learn what diversity is, and how to use it to maximize team performance, innovation and creativity. You also learn how to draw out the collective wisdom of diverse teams, handle conflict and establish common ground rules through real-world cases and peer-to-peer discussions. In addition, you discover how to overcome common biases faced in diverse teams. Systems of power, reward and rhetoric are discussed to help you create prosperous teams where differences flourish.

There is mounting concern that organizational groups and teams often fail to learn from their past experiences. It’s pertinent to address this issue as groups and teams are often the main ways that work gets done in organizations. In this course, we examine the main reasons that groups and teams are often ineffective, which include: • The lack of organizational structures and support for teams and groups • The lack of understanding and emphasis on learning • Misaligned reward structures So, what can be done to create an enabling learning culture in teams? This course emphasizes practical and impactful ways to begin to address this state of affairs. Through the use of stories, scenarios with actors simulating different team issues, examples and dialogue, you learn how to: • Understand teams in their larger organizational context • Diagnose the learning strengths and barriers to learning on teams • Identify ways to develop a team and group that continually learns and impacts the larger organization positively • Create an organizational environment that encourages learning and innovation