Multi-Team Leader (MTL) Program
Interactive Webinars
90 Minutes / week
Live presentation and Q&A with Dave Silverman + CrossLead team. The webinar recording will be available immediately after the session concludes.
Focus Groups
30 - 60 minutes / week
Participants will attend a small focus group session with a CrossLead facilitator and their team to reflect on the weekly practical exercise and personal application of the materials.
Self-Guided Practical
60 minutes / week
Students will complete a self-guided practical exercise. Additional readings and pre-recorded videos will be available for further exploration.
About the Program
CrossLead Multi-Team Leader is our flagship executive development program designed for senior management and their teams.
After this program, participants will be able to:
- Develop a cross-team operating rhythm that enables rapid learning and feedback loops
- Leverage an agile planning and prioritization process to foster an environment of constant improvement
- Serve as role models by demonstrating leadership behaviors that encourage a growth mindset and team adaptability
- Contribute to the enterprise’s rolling planning process
- Learn the skills to lead in a post-pandemic world
Program Structure
This five-week virtual training program concentrates on individual skills and team-based processes to help leaders succeed in the context of an agile, self-organized team environment. Leaders will leave the program with a better understanding of themselves, their teams, and how they can stimulate an environment of continuous improvement.
CrossLeaders play a critical role in creating the conditions required for agile teams to be successful and maintain connections across the organization.
Get Results
Learning Modules
Not only will you learn the core capabilities of high-performing teams and the strategies for managing multi-team systems, you’ll also create real deliverables to implement immediately. Throughout the program, you’ll partner with other participants to pressure test your assumptions and review deliverables.
- This introductory module describes the practical experience of transforming a large, bureaucratic organization into an adaptable network of high-performing teams. This segment will frame the limitations of command-and-control leadership styles and offer a compelling case for change.
- In today’s complex world, traditional management practices hold organizations back from unlocking their full potential. The role of leaders must shift from chess masters who carefully plan and execute every move to gardeners who cultivate an environment of continuous growth and self-sufficiency. This segment will focus on the role of the leader on a self-organized team. We will unpack how to identify key attributes of successful leaders of agile teams and the antipatterns that prevent team cohesion.
- Participants will complete a short assessment of their existing team’s capabilities. The results will highlight specific areas of opportunity, enabling the participant to design targeted interventions.
- As President Dwight D. Eisenhower once famously said, “Plans are worthless, but planning is indispensable.” This segment emphasizes the role of planning in an agile enterprise and provides techniques for creating and managing flexible strategic and operational plans that enable companies to experiment and pivot towards their goals.
- Focus is a key differentiator for both individuals and organizations; having just a few top priorities outperforms a long list every time. Multi-team leaders are regularly tasked with prioritizing limited resources across disparate groups. This segment will provide an overview of both organizational and individual prioritization, offering tangible frameworks for managing both.
- Participants will complete a team-based prioritization exercise using real business initiatives or projects.
- In a complex and uncertain world, no team can expect to always “get it right” the first time; instead, success will be a process of trial-and-error, and the teams who learn the fastest will lead the pack. While some learning occurs naturally across teams, there are several lightweight processes that teams can adopt to accelerate their learning rate. This segment will introduce these operating mechanisms and show how they adapt to different organizational contexts.
- Leading an agile team requires a shift from “managing” to “coaching.” Leaders are responsible for building the supportive environment their teams need to thrive and addressing performance gaps when they arise. This segment focuses on four specific coaching skills: active listening, demonstrating empathy, delivering feedback, and resolving conflict within and across teams.
- Students will share their teams’ weekly operating rhythm and collaborate to improve one another’s meeting cadence.
- A growth mindset believes that abilities can be improved over time and not fixed at birth. While seemingly simple, shifting to a growth mindset has many positive benefits for leaders: it helps them see feedback as an opportunity rather than a threat and focus on overcoming rather than avoiding challenges. This segment focuses on cue recognition of fixed and growth mindsets within yourself and teammates.
- Leading an agile team or a team of agile teams requires that leaders always ask one question: What stops my team from doing the best work of their lives? Removing impediments is one of the essential responsibilities of agile leaders. This segment will focus on identifying systemic barriers to progress and designing habits to reinforce empowerment.
- Students will develop team-based working agreements consistent with the principles of self-organization.
- Self-awareness is frequently identified as one of the most important skills for career and leadership success. While moderating one’s behavior was necessary for command-and-control settings, it is uniquely critical in agile environments where leaders’ influence outweighs their formal authority. Students will walk away from this segment with practical techniques for improving their self-awareness.
- The final module will recapitulate critical learnings from the prior nine modules and share how the students have applied the lessons in their leadership roles throughout the program’s duration. Students will leave the module with tangible examples of how the program’s content has been leveraged by peers to improve their teams’ performance and a personal list of commitments that, as a leader, they plan to uphold after the program.
- Students will share their commitments with their focus group teams and commit to new behaviors and processes to implement.
Each weekly module will include two learning segments that address both the individual skills and organizational processes needed to drive results.
