Global business confronts one of its greatest challenges in decades salvaging its basic credibility amidst a climate with the ethical transgressions and company failures of a few having fallout that has devastated the many. You couldn’t have chosen a more exciting time to attend the University of Michigan Business School, where we believe in developing business leaders of conscience -- people committed to the highest of ethics, who provide moral and civic leadership, leveraging their power and influence for the betterment of society. The world cries out for future business leaders with such standards, for leaders skilled in leading a diverse workforce and treating the world as one large community...one in which they are a partner and respected member.

To assist you in developing these skills we have created the Leadership Development Program (LDP), which is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking experience that engages you in the critical issues affecting today’s business climate. Beginning in this program and for the next two years, you will be challenged to develop your own "Teachable Point of View" Ô (TPOV) on being a businessperson who operates ethically, your personal commitment to renewing people’s faith in business. The foundational principle of LDP is that leaders must be people of integrity who are able to work in teams, understand diversity, have a clearly developed set of values, and have the ability to articulate their leadership agenda. Those items roll up to form your TPOVÔ. LDP is an action-learning program that begins to form your special view, by immersing you in the issues leaders need to understand. By action-learning we mean more than just an immersion experience. It is a process that involves self-reflection, analysis, and discussion in order to get the most out of the experience. Facilitating this experience will be 2^nd year MBAs who, through additional training, have developed the skills necessary to ensure your experience will be a fulfilling one.

In developing leadership skills there is no simple formula to follow. It is a human process, full of trial and error, intuition, and insight. It takes practice to achieve competency. But while there is no set formula there is a framework within which to work. Through LDP we seek to develop the framework while providing you with a fun, energetic, and risk-free environment in which to practice.

LDP is the start of a two-year MBA process where you will develop the four elements of

your Teachable Point of View.Ô These four basic building blocks will enable you, now as students and in the future as business leaders, to create dynamic and engaging stories that detail where you are today, where you are going tomorrow, and how you will get there. We expect you to develop this Teachable Point of ViewÔ and bring it to the organizations you become a part of.

Ideas: Great companies are built on ideas. By passing ideas to others and teaching others how to develop good ideas, leaders create organizations that are finely tuned toward delivering success. The MBA program offers a wealth of contemporary information and cutting edge business ideas. These ideas can provide the answer to: Where are we going? What are we aiming to accomplish?

Values: Winning leaders articulate values explicitly and shape values that support business ideas. For example, GE’s Jack Welch articulated the value of "boundarylessness" in order to facilitate speed-to-market, the generation of ideas across a vast complex company, and the sharing of best practices. The MBA program is complete with values like respect for your peers, arguing against the position but not the person, etc. The values element guides the organization in the kinds of behavior required to be a member of the organization.

Leadership in Action

Leadership is about moving people to action. Successful leaders are people of integrity who are skilled in establishing direction, gaining commitment, and motivating others to achieve the desired outcomes. They understand that different situations require different leadership styles and that people react differently to given situations. Developing an awareness of how different people behave, think, and are motivated is critical to becoming an effective leader. This awareness provides both the intellectual discipline and behavioral flexibility leaders need to fully leverage the human capital in their organizations.

LEADERSHIP STYLE

Leadership researchers consistently conclude that self-awareness is a core leadership competency. Successful leaders give serious thought to how their personality styles influence their effectiveness. You will see how your social style affects your relationships with others, your ability to solve problems, and your ability to influence others to implement your ideas. In addition, the self-knowledge that you will be given is vital for goal setting and career planning.

Style is defined as a pattern of behavior resulting from differing degrees of assertiveness and responsiveness. Your social style will define you in terms of the degree that you use these two qualities it does not determine your personality.

There are four distinct social styles and everyone has some aspects of each one. You will take the Social Styles Self-Assessment to identify your dominant social style and think about how it may influence your success in the MBA program and in your career. Knowing your social style should not limit your behavior it merely indicates your comfort zone. In addition to the Self-Assessment you will be given a Style Flex booklet to help you deal with the differing social styles of others most effectively.

Although no style is generally better or worse than the others, each style has specific strengths and weaknesses that can influence your effectiveness on the job, your career success, and your general well-being.

BUILDING A DIVERSE TEAM

In today’s competitive business environment an organization cannot survive without effective teamwork. People working in teams bring more resources to a task, including a variety of perspectives, knowledge, skills, experience, and backgrounds. When well-managed, teams can use these resources to produce greater productivity and creativity than any individual or group of individuals. Notably, one of the most consistent findings in group research is that diverse groups, when well-managed, tend to make better decisions than homogeneous groups, particularly when dealing with non-routine, complex problems. However, creating an effective diverse team takes skill, knowledge, and discipline.

Differences take many forms. Certainly people differ along dimensions such as gender, race, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, class and nationality. People also differ in values, perceptions, attitudes, work styles, life styles, knowledge, skills, and experience. These differences have the potential to enrich any organization by broadening everyone’s perspectives, introducing new information and fresh viewpoints, increasing creativity, improving problem solving, and in general, making life and work more interesting.

Effective leaders do not settle for just "tolerating" differences, they embrace them. They draw on characteristics that are hallmarks of effective leadership: being open-minded, taking risks, having courage, enjoying the company of many different types of people, and being kind and gracious.

Diversity should be part of a bigger plan of action, addressing the systems, the structures, and the culture of the organization. The argument for diversity is also a business one: the importance of diversity is seen as its potential to enhance shareholder value. Added to a director’s core competencies, the additional experience and knowledge bases brought about by diversity can contribute to profit generation.

The importance of diversity has increasingly been realized by corporations over the past decade. Pfizer’s website states: "Diversity of thought is critical to reaching the most innovative, customer-focused solutions to the many issues, problems and challenges confronting our business." With so many corporations delving into the global market, it is important to get a diverse perspective of the cultures they will be embracing. Many companies, including Denny’s and Ford, have come under fire for discrimination and a lack of diversity and unfortunately only saw the importance of a diverse workforce after these incidents. Denny’s and Ford since this time have praised the additional benefits achieved through their diversity initiatives and have won national diversity leadership awards.

As part of LDP you will be directly involved with people from culturally, globally, and ethnically diverse backgrounds. Teamwork in this diverse setting is an extremely valuable learning experience and an important part of LDP.

TEAM BUILDING

LDP is a hands-on program that allows participants to develop awareness and skills through problem solving analysis followed by reflection and discussion. The team building experience used in LDP involves a series of outdoor problem-solving activities that students will perform in a number of diverse teams. However, these activities are not about outdoor games. Rather, they involve a means by which the challenge of real-time problem-solving activities can be used to develop skills directly relevant to team performance and leadership. By using the differing social styles, backgrounds, insight, etc. of the team most effectively, you will succeed in the activities and gain insight into an effective way of solving business problems. Upon completion of each exercise, the team performance will be analyzed and discussed so that real learning can be developed.

During this team building module you will be engaged in a series of five or six exercises. Listen closely to the instructions of your Team Leader. Following each exercise, your Team Leader will facilitate team reflection and discussion. It is the role of the Team Leader to ensure that issues are raised and understood and that an effective team discussion takes place. To facilitate an understanding of the team process, the g.r.p.i. model will be used after each exercise as a discussion tool.

To ensure that the teams you will be a part of throughout LDP are truly diverse, the program will start with a team formation exercise. The goal of this exercise is to form teams in which:

• No one on the team knows another team member.
• There is a mix of men/women/minorities/international.
• Different work skills and backgrounds are represented.
• There are 8-10 people on each team.

G.R.P.I. - A tool for improving team performance: To assist you in understanding how effective teams work, a model for diagnosing and improving team effectiveness has been provided. This model identifies four pillars of team effectiveness: Goals, Roles, Process, and Interpersonal Relations. In moving through the hierarchical framework, the first step is to determine goals followed by allocating work roles, identifying team processes, and finally working with personalities, styles, and cultural differences. "Process loss" can be minimized by systematically working down through each layer.

Goals - The critical ingredient of all high-performing teams is goal clarity. Such teams have a clear understanding of, and commitment to, a specific goal. When clarity exists, a specific performance objective can be used to determine when the team’s goal has been met.

Roles - An important factor in the development of a high-performance is the structure of the team itself. The team structure refers to relationships, roles, and responsibilities within the group. It provides the framework that allows team members to work closely and productively as they pursue interdependent tasks.

Process - This is the means by which the team makes decisions, resolves conflict, and shares information. Truly effective teams do not always agree, but they do handle conflict in a way that transforms differences into a positive force.

Interpersonal -Teams are communities. The way in which its members relate to one another and the community will have a major impact on the team’s spirit, emotional well-being, and overall effectiveness. Problems invariably manifest themselves in these areas, but often they originate in the structure or purpose of the team.

G.R.P.I.

"A Model for Improving Team Effectiveness."