Helping Develop High-Performing Teams

The mpd2 program places a strong emphasis on teamwork so that students can become valued team members and leaders after they graduate.

A survey of 1,000 US-based office workers found that less than 9 percent of participants felt they worked on a high-performing team.

Northwestern Engineering's Master of Product Design and Development Management (mpd2) program recently tweaked its curriculum to help students understand the skills necessary to drive effective teamwork.

"Leaders in business have a great appreciation for and place a lot of value on people who can make teams work and make teams excel," mpd2 director Jim Wicks said. "The students get that opportunity in this program, and they get to test it in some ways in a lower-risk situation."

Much of the mpd2 curriculum relies on student collaboration. Students are separated into teams at the beginning of their first quarter and stay together for the duration of the program, including for the capstone project. The capstone is a year-long opportunity for students to work in teams to create a product or service that solves a consumer problem. At the end of the project, students pitch their product or service to venture capitalists.

To better prepare students for that experience, program leadership made adjustments to the Team Building and Organizational Behavior class students take during their first quarter in the program. Adjunct lecturer Caroline Vial, founder and chief executive coach of Upward Bound Executive Coaching, taught the class for the first time this quarter.

Vial is also serving as a consultant for all teams. In that role, she will meet with each team twice per quarter to help strengthen their connections and navigate potential obstacles that arise.

"Instead of waiting for issues to come up, we've created an opportunity to be proactive in engaging the teams on a regular basis," Wicks said. "We'll be able to help students identify emerging challenges when there is still a positive vibe in the group and offer techniques and methods to work through those challenges."

Program leadership carefully considers how the teams are formed. Students are asked to complete the CliftonStrengths assessment to identify and measure how they think, feel, and behave. The results are categorized into 34 themes related to strategic thinking, relationship building, influencing, and executing.

Leadership takes those assessment results, as well as personal backgrounds and interest in potential capstone topics into consideration when forming teams. No matter how much time and energy goes into forming a team, there will always be difficulties that present themselves.

Wicks said the most common challenge mpd2 teams face is similar to what businesses all over the world face: poor communication.

Current explanations for ineffective communication in the workplace include today's multigenerational workforce, but Wicks said one of the key drivers is the difference in how people communicate. Many times, extroverts may be the first people to share ideas within a group, and that by itself could lead introverts to withhold their own ideas.

"Teams need to be comfortable with the fact that people process and communicate in different ways and at different speeds," Wicks said. "That doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the idea, so that creative process, or the synthesis of the creative process, is really important to address as a team."

Having a strong team is akin to having a strong marriage, Wicks said. The key to success comes down to valuing others, developing strong relationships, and constantly communicating with one another. When that happens, team members are able to respect one another and play to each other's strengths, creating a high-performing team in the process.

"One of the key components of the mpd2 program is teaching empathy for the consumer, but to have an effective team, you need to have empathy for your other team members," Wicks said. "In the product design and development space, you and your teammates all have to be on the same page. When a team is focused on the same cause, the result can be incredibly powerful."