Constructive Collaboration: Driving Performance in Teams, Organizations and Partnerships

This program is designed for middle- and senior-level executives who must coordinate with multiple constituencies or who are looking for opportunities to enhance collaboration with business partners, clients, and peers.

This program is particularly useful for managers who lead teams; drive business development; manage joint ventures; oversee post-merger or acquisition integration; manage channel partner performance; or serve in a cross-functional integrator role, such as managing brands, products or key accounts.

In this program you will learn to:

1. Hone your skills to become a successful collaborator
2. Understand how to assess and value collaboration
3. Understand how to articulate and sell the value of collaboration to clients, partners and stakeholders
4. Construct a personal development plan for continuous improvement
5. Learn how to identify and create value through analysis of stakeholders' perspectives and interests
6. Design collaborative structures to maximize constructive and minimize destructive conflict

Designing Collaboration
In complex organizations, collaboration is critical to creating value for the firm, yet it is one of the more difficult competencies to master in management. Therefore knowing how to ensure acollaboration process is paramount to success. You will learn how to structure and design organizations, teams, and jobs to meet strategic objectives, how to minimize conflict that interferes with productivity, and how to encourage conflict that leads to value creation.

Decision Making in a Collaborative Setting
Multi-functional teams are one of the most often used mechanisms of collaboration to drive performance in organizations. In practice, however, diverse interests and communication styles create conflict and encumber decision making. In Constructive Collaboration, you will learn the tools to make better decisions and to successfully resolve conflicts—the fundamental competencies required for successful collaboration.

Collaborating in Diverse Teams
To create value, people in organizations must work across silos and geographies, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and act swiftly to solve problems. We will focus on how teams can collaborate effectively amidst organizational barriers, deadline pressures and communication challenges.

Working Across Countries and Cultures
We will focus on the unique challenges facing leaders who must forge collaboration. We will discuss how executives from developed economies can better identify the cultural differences and institutional voids that permeate many of the emerging economies, and how this appropriate diagnosis can improve the likelihood of designing and operating successful strategic alliances.

Robert Dewar - Academic Director; Associate Professor of Management & Organizations

Leigh Thompson - Academic Director; J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution & Organizations; Director of Kellogg Team and Group Research Center; Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (Courtesy)

David Austen-Smith - Senior Associate Dean: Faculty and Research; Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics

Jeanne Brett - DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr., Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations; Director of Dispute Resolution Research Center

Ginger L. Graham - President and CEO, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Inc

Edward Zajac - James F. Bere Professor of Management & Organizations; Chair of the Management & Organizations Department; Director of Kellogg’s Center for Strategic Alliance Research