Warrior Readiness for Coalition and Collaborative Teams

The focus of this proposal is to develop a leadership training system that facilitates the development and maintenance of high performance in multi-cultural teams. Specifically, the goal of this effort is to develop a scenario-based assessment andtraining system that can be implemented through a web network or standalone PC - the Functional Learning Levers Team Leader Toolkit (the FuLL TiLT). For team leaders to effectively intervene to improve performance in a multi-cultural team, they mustunderstand the leverage points for team performance-those team behaviors that are 1) critical for performance and 2) most likely to be adversely affected by diversity. The FuLL TiLT will prepare leaders to recognize and act on these leverage points. Thesystem will assess team leader performance in multi-cultural teams, inform the training methods for enhancing that performance, and automatically structure scenario selection for focused, experience-based training to enhance skills and knowledge foroperating within multi-cultural teams. In this way, the FuLL TiLT will utilize multiple training methods (e.g., written text, vignettes, images, and video-clips) to 1) train the important multi-cultural leader concepts (e.g., what is closed loopcommunication) and 2) give the multi-cultural leader practice and feedback in multi-cultural environments. Many military, diplomatic, and commercial activities require that people lead teams either 1) composed of people with diverse cultural backgroundsor 2) existing within a different culture. Specification of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to perform effectively within these multi-cultural team environments provides a means to structure leader training. The training system describedin this proposal is intended to provide an integrated method to assess and train multi-cultural team leaders. Our approach provides team leaders a specific method to build and maintain high performance multi-cultural teams. This tool will be useful tomilitary and commercial applications that need to train for multi-cultural operations and are dependent on high reliability team performance.