Academics Learn to Build Great Teams of Diverse People

Successful academics usually get their jobs based on specialized expertise, not their management ability. Yet professors taking Professor Charles Leiserson’s short program are finding that learning how to build and lead a successful team can improve their teaching and their productivity. This knowledge is particularly important for technical people because many contemporary problems—both in industry and research—are so complex that they require teams to solve.

Leiserson’s summer course, Leadership Skills for Engineering and Science Faculty, first took shape at Akamai Technologies more than a decade ago. He took a leave from MIT to serve as the startup’s director of system architecture, gathered a team, and went to work. Unfortunately, he notes, when these bright people got together, “We were pretty dysfunctional as a team.”

For help, the company tapped Boston-area consultant Chuck McVinney, who specializes in building successful, creative teams. After a couple of workshops, Leiserson’s group was transformed. “I was amazed at how effectively we were working together with just a minimal amount of input,” he says.

When he returned to MIT, Leiserson began using these skills, first offering workshops to students in the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program and then to MIT faculty. Now he and McVinney teach the course each summer on campus and they have offered customized versions at Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and the National University of Singapore.

What do academics learn in his course? For starters, they work on group culture, team leadership, conflict resolution, motivation, learning styles, and listening skills. One example is teaching mental diversity to science and engineering faculty. “To communicate effectively with someone who thinks differently from you, you need to speak their language,” he says. “Technical researchers often talk ‘nerd talk’ when advocating to nontechnical people, which is like speaking a foreign language to them.”

Faculty are unlikely to have this training when they start their academic careers, says Anna Mahr, MIT Professional Education Associate Director for Short Programs. “They are expected to pick up leadership skills—but it can be a long and painful process. In this course, there is an ‘aha moment’ when you realize people are different and you have to act accordingly. To have a successful team, you need to know what works for others as well as what works for you.”

Leiserson continues to teach the course through MIT Professional Education as a service to his fellow academics and because it has improved his own teaching, he says. For example, he applies one of the course concepts, situational leadership, to his daily work. Faculty may routine apply one or two of the leadership methods—directing, coaching, participating, and delegating—but they can be more effective teachers if they can draw on all four, depending on circumstances.

Leiserson has taught MIT Professional Education courses in his academic field, parallel computing, in the past and he offers multicore programming, a field he is pioneering, as a custom program. His work has many real-world applications. While a corporate fellow at Thinking Machines Corporation, he designed and led the implementation of the network architecture for the Connection Machine Model CM-5 Supercomputer. He was founder and chief technology officer of Cilk Arts, Inc., a start-up that was acquired by Intel in 2009. In his spare time, Leiserson stays.

In his spare time, Leiserson stays active with biking, skiing, and swimming. And, as a self-described nerd, he likes techno-toys and reading material like Scientific America—which awakened his interest in mathematics and computers when he began reading it in middle school.