Presentation Summary

Leading & Growing Highly Effective Teams

Teams are one of the essential building blocks of contemporary organizations. Organizations are looking to teams to make some of their toughest decisions or to develop some of their most daring ideas. Although teams are ubiquitous, they rarely perform up to their potential. This session will help you address the issue of underperformance and enable you to become a team leader whose members will give you their all.

Topics

• Types of teams and when each type is needed

• What makes teams effective and how teams get derailed

• Three basics of team design: context, structure and process

Benefits

• Make better decisions about when and where to utilize teams

• Increased buy-in and commitment from team members

• Stronger team performance and member capacity

Bio

Markus Baer, Ph.D. (baer@wustl.edu) is an award-winning scholar and teacher and a thought leader in the field of creativity. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis. He earned his M.A. in Psychology from the Justus-LiebigUniversity in Giessen, Germany and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., he was part of the founding team of a consulting start-up.

Dr. Baer’s research, which can be found in the leading academic journals, has won multiple awards, including the “Olin Award Recognizing Research That Transforms Business.” His work on creativity and problem formulation has gained wide-spread attention for having significantly shaped current thinking on these topics. In his role as coordinator of the Ph.D. program in Organizational Behavior, he is devoted to supporting and training young scholars. He is currently serving as primary advisor to numerous PhD students at the Olin Business School.

Recognized for his expertise, Dr. Baer has served on the editorial boards of some of the most prestigious research journals in the field of management, such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organization Science. In 2016, he started his three-year tenure as Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Journal, a leadership position at the most influential empirical research journal in the field of management.

Dr. Baer is an acclaimed teacher and has received accolades for his teaching from the Olin Business School, where he won consecutive teaching awards, and internationally as one of the world’s top 40 business professors under 40. He teaches courses on organizational behavior (with a specific focus on motivation and teams) and creativity and innovation across a variety of programs, including the BSBA, MBA, and Executive MBA programs. Recognized for his passionate advocacy, Dr. Baer teaches well beyond his home town of St. Louis to include engagements in China (Shanghai) and India (Mumbai). Since 2013, Dr. Baer has been collaborating with the Brookings Executive Education program in Washington D.C. for which he teaches a nationwide audience of government executives. In addition, he has taught at various government agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and the Department of the Interior (DOI) to name a few.

A highly sought-after speaker, Dr. Baer is recognized worldwide as a champion of research on creativity and innovation, as an adventurous scholar and thinker, and as a skillful communicator. Internationally, he has given more than 50 invited research presentations both in university and non-university settings (e.g., Central Intelligence Agency), and he is a frequent presenter and panelist at international research conferences.