Inside Teams@Haas, a leadership ecosystem that develops 1,500 students annually

Thirteen years after launching Teams@Haas in the Berkeley Haas Full-Time MBA program, Brandi Pearce still lights up when she talks about teams: how they develop, how people lead, how teams navigate challenges when they falter, and what makes the best teams work.

“When I walk through our campus, it feels like a playground to me,” said Pearce, a professional faculty member whose flagship Teams@Haas program is an evidence-based framework for teamwork that’s now widely used across different programs. “Ultimately what I am trying to do here is build a leadership ecosystem. We’re bringing together different talents and perspectives, exploring, creating the conditions to innovate and champion bold ideas, and ultimately supporting each other’s development.”

Teams@Haas, which serves more than 1,500 Berkeley Haas students annually, taps tools, techniques, and coaching to strengthen team dynamics and uses the academic team experience to help students learn and grow as leaders. 

Pearce’s latest expansion to the program pairs MBA students who have completed the Teams@Haas program with undergraduates enrolled in the Leading High Impact Teams course and the Spieker Gateway course called Foundations of Business. Both courses are offered in the new four-year Spieker Undergraduate Program. (Students previously started at Haas as juniors.)

Emma Daftary, assistant dean of Undergraduate Programs, was enthusiastic when Pearce pitched the idea of adding the mentorship component to both classes. “Our Haas undergraduate students value their time with our MBA students, and they seek out opportunities to learn from them whenever possible,” Daftary said. “This also gives MBA students the opportunity to deepen their learning while providing mentorship, which is brilliant.” 

‘A special experience’

MBA students say that they’ve found coaching a fulfilling part of their program—and that it’s helped them to more deeply understand teammates and themselves.

“It’s not just a workshop,” said Brian Martinez, MBA 26, who was a senior instructor at the United States Military Academy at West Point before coming to Haas. “Jumping in and becoming a mentor coach” after training to use the Teams@Haas framework and tools allowed him to better connect with undergraduate students. “I was able to show them why this is important, and how I’ve used it at school, and how I plan to use it going forward in my career,” he said.

For undergraduates, the Leading High Impact Teams class allows students to work with MBA mentors as they take a deeper dive nto many of the learnings from their Foundations of Business course, which they took as first-years. The course requires students to craft a plan and check in with their mentor to measure progress. 

The undergraduates who participate are about the same age as many of the workers that the MBA students will eventually be leading after they graduate, Pearce said. “Our MBAs are at a career inflection point, where they will be around other colleagues who are confident, and they have to step into their own confidence,” she said. “I think this is a special experience to do just that.”

Lily Rzonca, BS 25, said she appreciated that Leading High Impact Teams gave everyone the chance to lead and experiment. “We have a lot of high-achieving individuals at Haas, and everybody’s the leader,” she said. “I wanted to see what it would be like to lead a team, but also experience what it would be like to be a different type of team player so this helped give me a broader perspective.”

Leading with and through others

Masha Lisak, MBA 12, the lead coach who oversees a team of 20 executive coaches that support Teams@Haas, said all of the student teams are intentionally nonhierarchical, which gives everyone a chance to make decisions about who takes a lead on what aspects of a project.

“While those who’ve spent more time in the workplace are accustomed to hierarchy, the undergraduate students can be more proficient at self-organizing in a way that works best for that team of people,” she said. “What I find is really helpful to students is to encourage them to ‘Think of this project as your leadership sandbox or as your teaming sandbox.’ It’s a supportive, low-stakes environment to experiment and grow new skills.”

Pearce understands that students want real-world experiences that complement theoretical learning. In the Spieker Gateway course, for example, her content functions as a learning lab that emphasizes four core competencies, foundational skills needed for collaborative learning: Critical thinking, perspective taking, collaborative problem solving, and synthesizing, as well as four leadership development stages: Who am I, who am I with others, who am I in a team, and who am I as a leader? These are skills that students learn best when they put them into practice, reflect, and then connect the experience to the theory that informs why they matter,” she said. “Our students want to learn the tools and the theoretical frameworks, but they also want application. They want to understand the link to the real world.”

Rachel Carter, BS 27, who has taken both the Spieker Gateway course and Leading High Impact Teams said she’s already applying what she learned about communication styles in class to run better meetings as the director of internal affairs for the Haas Undergraduate Black Business Association. 

For example, at meetings, she asks everyone to nominally brainstorm by writing down ideas on sticky notes before sharing with the team. It’s a technique that helps give introverts, individuals communicating in different languages, or those who have different processing speeds, the time and space required to collect thoughts before sharing.

“Sometimes when you’re working with a team and you’re given a question to figure out, usually the loudest people end up speaking first and speaking the most, and it doesn’t give room for others to share their perspectives,” she said. “Using the sticky notes method helped everyone.” 

Rzonca said she also uses a tool that her MBA mentor taught them in class: to use time blocking on her calendar strategically. “When I am leading a team or stressed out I’ll do a time block,” she said, adding that she plans to keep using it at work when she graduates.

Motivating people

Another Teams@Haas goal is to cultivate the team’s collaborative culture, which can help tap into a desire for connection and learning, creating more accountability to each other—even if the task at hand is not motivating or a top priority, Pearce said. 

“Often in teams there can be a pattern of freeloading,” she said. “We’re creating the conditions where that’s less likely to happen because people are more motivated because they know and care about each other.” Strong communication skills can also help struggling teams improve, said Debra Underwood, MBA 02, who works as a professional coach in addition to her work as a coach with Teams@Haas.

“The beautiful examples are when a team isn’t doing great and they don’t know how to talk about it,” she said. “Once they talk about it from their own perspective, owning responsibility for themselves, not projecting their experience onto others in a blaming way, and listening to each other’s experiences, they can come up with agreements and experiments for how the team might work that works better for everybody. And it’s lovely. “

After every major project milestone that the undergraduates achieved, they worked with the MBA coaches to engage their teams in a reflexivity exercise—a practice of reflection and adaptation within a team. 

To help reinforce the team’s collective values, they start this workshop with a “swift appreciation,” or the opportunity to tell someone directly what you appreciate about them, the impact this behavior has on you, and what you believe the impact is to the team. “It was everyone’s favorite activity,” said Teams@Haas coach Sofi Trexler, MBA 26. “Teams@Haas has made me realize how important it is to be intentional with our language.”

Martinez, who was traveling in Tanzania on a consulting assignment with the Berkeley Haas International Business Development program, over the summer, said he now uses swift appreciation with his team. “We were all sitting at dinner, and we went around, and we actually did the gratitude circle,” he said. “I really am taking that part from the program and learning to be more vocal in giving that gratitude.”

Underwood, a Teams@Haas coach since 2012, said the program has created important changes to the ways students collaborate all over Haas—something she appreciates from her days as a student when an academic team “either worked or it didn’t.”

“What the program offers now is a chance for students to understand that they have agency in helping their teams work well, in helping the team as a whole develop toward whatever ‘better’ looks like for that team, but also helping the individuals on those teams develop and grow,” she said.

For Pearce, it’s gratifying that students take what they learn through Teams@Haas and apply it to create unique and powerful leadership ecosystems here at Haas and throughout their careers. “It’s beautiful payback,” she said.