15.337 Teams Lab

Leading Effective Teams

Summary

Teams Lab is a hands-on course that equips students with the frameworks, tools, and experiences to become trusted, effective team members and leaders. Class sessions combine business cases, real-world teaming scenarios, structured exercises, and peer-based reflection to develop team leadership skills—including giving feedback, navigating conflict, and working through interpersonal challenges. Students meet one-on-one with a professional executive coach throughout the semester for personalized feedback, reflection, and accountability.

The course also features business leaders at different stages in their careers, who share real-world experiences tied specifically to course themes. Students leave the course with a deeper understanding of how they show up in teams, and a practical roadmap for leading with greater awareness, insight, and impact.

Why This Course?

Teams Lab prepares students to become the team member or leader of choice in any organization of which they are a part. Teaming is the way all organizations get things done, but teaming is very difficult. Because human beings are fallible, shaped by unique histories and dispositions, navigating this complexity requires leaders who are savvy to the dynamics that shape trust, alignment, and performance.

The course launches directly into the hard work of teaming by uncovering what makes teaming so challenging. It systematically engages the very human and often off-the-radar dimensions that fuel conflict on teams, including, if not especially, what we bring to a teaming dynamic—something which is often much easier to identify in others than in ourselves.

The course offers a series of diagnostic and decision-making frameworks for driving alignment without undermining trust.

If you’ve ever wanted frameworks, tools, or practice for teaming with the micromanager, procrastinator, know-it-all, opportunist, naysayer, or absentee, then consider Teams Lab.

During this course, students step through many practical situations they will likely face when teaming. These include practicing how to:

  • Lead without formal authority
  • Give and receive feedback effectively
  • Have difficult discussions and manage emotionally charged situations, including addressing norm violations
  • Leverage the strengths of a diverse team (functional, cultural, experiential)

Teams Lab not only equips students with knowledge and understanding of when teaming is the right work design choice, but also the general recognition that teams need constant care and attention, how to pay attention and foster a team, and frameworks and tools for addressing team dysfunctions.

Course Highlights

  • Interactive class sessions focused on real-world team leadership scenarios
  • One-on-one and small group collaboration to explore a range of team dynamics
  • Structured peer-based reflection to improve self-awareness and interpersonal effectivenessLive conversations with business leaders about teaming-specific challenges
  • Live conversations with business leaders about teaming-specific challenges
  • Regular meetings with professional executive coaches for personalized feedback, reflection, and accountability

Teams Lab works from the inside out. Students deepen self-awareness—not just as a reflective practice, but as a relational one—so they can better understand their impact on others and build the kinds of relationships that enable high-functioning teams.

Like all Leadership Center courses, Teams Lab does not promote a one-size-fits-all model of leadership. Instead, it offers a process that helps students build a way of leading rooted in their values, responsive to team dynamics, and adaptable to the challenges they will face throughout their careers.

Course Expectations

Being Fully Present - Learning about teams is best done as a team, so being fully present is this course’s biggest expectation. Given the applied, interactive learning and practice course design, showing up prepared to engage fully is how the most learning takes place. The course is grounded in the belief that leadership development comes through an ongoing process of diagnosis, experimentation, and learning.

Individual and Interpersonal Risk-Taking and Responsibility - In many ways, conflict whether within us or between us requires self-awareness, perspective getting, and a growth mindset—all of which entail some vulnerability. Together students and the instructor build a psychologically safe place to learn and nurture that space with great intention.

How Many Credits Will I Get & How Will I Be Graded?

Teams Lab is a 9-credit course offered during the fall term. We will not grade your team leadership ability, rather you will be graded on participation, engagement, timely completion of assignments, coaching hours, personal commitment, and genuine effort. This course meets the MBA Leadership Elective requirement.

How Do I Enroll in Teams Lab?

Students must meet the following pre-requisites:

  • Must be a second-year MBA student
  • Must commit to completing all the components of the course
  • Plan to bid on the class in the Course Bidding site.