Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1275152
AUGUST 2020 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 65 Johnson: That's intriguing that the students feel there really is a need to be in the live class. And that's inter- esting in a long-distance learning situation. Can you attribute that to anything in particular? Mucha: There are two things. One, we have class discus- sions. Sometimes, because of the material, I have to be a talking head, but we try to break into a class discussion whenever possible. Students say it's one reason they show up to class. Two, they like seeing what's on a slide and then being able to interact. They show up because they want to hear the stories. Matties: Do these people come in with lead- ership skills, or do they develop through this program? Mucha: It's all over the map. Some of them have very good leadership skills and are senior in their career, while some are brand new to program management. In some cases, they've been in a technical or manufacturing role where they've had some basic supervisory or leader- ship training. In other cases, they have good business skills but haven't had any leadership training. I have a master's degree in manage- ment, and I've taught in both MBA programs and in undergraduate business classes, so I'm able to lead them through a basic overview of management theory. I talk about the difference between managing and leading, so our first week is like a basic management 101 class in a master's degree program. We deal with the topics of difficult peo- ple, ethics, stress management, and how to build a team. It's very abbreviated compared to a college-level management program, but we hit the high points in terms of giving our students the skillset and knowledge to moti- vate their team to achieve high performance and deal with interpersonal skills issues that may arise. Another interesting aspect of the class is the weekly case study where we break our students up into teams, and they get together outside of class in Zoom meetings. It's interesting to them because they're from different com- panies, and when they get together and analyze a case study, they learn about the different ways their com- panies may approach these issues. In the leadership pro- gram, those studies involve employee conflict situa- tions, which is good. They also have "branched" learning exer- cises that involve what-if scenarios. Students view a series of conversations and then decide what the person in the conversation is going to say next in each scenario. It could be a pro- gram manager talking with an employee or it might be a customer. If they select one answer, it sends them down one branch. If they pick a different answer, it sends them down a dif- ferent branch, so they can see how choosing different answers impacts the flow of conver- sation and the ultimate outcome of that con- versation. We do that twice in the leadership sec- tion of the class and once in program man- agement skills, and then we administer some multiple-choice tests on the material to check their retention and understanding. We try to provide several different learning modalities to help them retain the information, then test whether they correctly understand the infor- mation. Matties: Leadership is a skillset in itself. You're teaching this. Is there a disconnect? With some people coming in as strong leaders and some who are 101, how do you bridge that range to satisfy each segment so one doesn't get bored because they already know everything and another feels they don't know anything? Carlos Plaza