Management and Leadership

Best Teams: Introverts, Extroverts, and Ambiverts

• Traditional Classroom: 2-day
• Virtual Instructor-led: Four 3-hour sessions

Effective, high-performing teams within organizations generate new ideas and approaches that solve problems and create innovative solutions efficiently, cost effectively and with highest level of quality. One key element to this amazing process is world-class ideation. To do this well, everyone needs to be effective at gathering groundbreaking ideas and identifying possible flaws quickly.

This course supports effective collaboration among introverts, extroverts, and ambiverts within project teams. When understood these differences can be help break through barriers and reach new levels of achievement and performance. This course is science-based, lively, inclusive, and transformative. You will learn from research in the areas of neuroscience, team effectiveness, and unconscious bias.

Every workplace today needs to leverage relationships and attitudes that get things done fast. This experiential program teaches the elements of collaboration between groups and engages participants in activities and conversations that strengthen collaboration built on differences within groups.

Target Audience

Individuals who will benefit from this course include anyone who needs to maximize great ideation, minimize personality conflicts, and increase team productivity.

Learning Objectives

• Evaluate how effectively a project team is working by identifying introverts, extroverts and ambiverts in a non-judgmental way, including the value they each bring to project teams.
• Diagnose obstacles hindering introverts, extroverts, and ambiverts from doing their best work and working effectively together.
• Design interventions and procedures to improve introverts’, extroverts’, and ambiverts’ ability to work together in team meetings that elicit more and better-quality ideas from all types of people, overcoming our natural biases that limit both seeking and giving of input freely.
• Coach to improve introverts’, extroverts’, and ambiverts’ ability to work together for greater productivity and by eliciting and valuing input from all types of people.

Course Outline

Day 1 (Sessions 1 and 2)

Module 1: Foundation Tools

• Understanding biases that block us
• Defining dimensions (introvert, ambivert, extrovert)
• A history of differences between the “verts”
• Role of psychological safety in eliciting ideation

Module 2: Overcoming Conflicts and Block

• Conflicts and blocks caused by the brain’s biases
• Introvert-Ambivert-Extrovert myths
• Priming your own brain
• Recognizing similarities and differences
• Case Study
• Magical Object: Diagnostic demonstration exercise

Module 3: Making Connections

• Share experiences overcoming challenges
• “Dialing up” a dimension to connect
• Creating greater psychological safety in work conversations
• Zoom team exercise: to illustrate and practice gaining input before decision making
• Feedforward too for giving suggestions
• Giving feedforward — helping others with their dimension

Module 4: Hearing for input

• Methods for drawing out all dimensions: introvert-ambivert-extrovert
• Practice exercise: Moon Chasm Crossing
• Non-judgmental Brainstorming
• Creating psychological safety
• Role play practice including feedforward
• Overnight practice commitment

Day 2 (Sessions 3 and 4)

Module 5: Working the Team

• Sharing overnight practice
• Bias blockers and interdimensional problems in meetings
• Designing team meetings to play to all strengths and include all people
• Interventions to address problem meetings:
• Goals, agendas in advance
• Solo time
• Partner conversations
• Individual work place meeting design exercise

Module 6: Influencing to overcome bias

• Intervening in bias and dimensional conflicts
• Nudging people in the right direction
• The importance and value of “Yes and ...”
• Role play skills practice

Module 7: Coaching Others

• Coaching others around biases and the value of each dimension — introvert, ambivert, extrovert
• Helping people work with a mix of dimensions
• Role Play: coaching skills practice around bias challenges and differing dimensions
• Tour group team challenge/practice for coaching

Module 8: Summary and Action Plans

• How to teach others about bias and dimensions
• Personal Planning
• Feedforward to each other on plans
• Planning role plays
• Ongoing development

MDI1567 Course Code