Spring
M 4-6pm
45-102
Instructor: Rachel Moore Best (rbest@mit.edu)
Units: 6
Prerequisites: A brief application may be used if enrollment exceeds capacity.
Course Purpose:
Technical leadership is not only a matter of arriving at the correct technical answer; it also requires the ability to guide conversations in complex situations involving multiple stakeholders, competing incentives, organizational dynamics, and significant implications for safety, cost, and relationships.
This course prepares you for those moments: design reviews, failure reviews, proposal evaluations, cross-functional meetings, and other situations where responsibilities and boundaries are fuzzy and sensemaking and communication must be integrated.
You will learn to:
— Recognize a critical conversation.
— Prepare thoughtfully, using evidence, empathy, and clear framing.
— Deliver feedback and disagreement without damaging trust.
— Identify key stakeholders, dissenters, and veto players in a room.
— Influence across boundaries of role, expertise, and authority.
— Diagnose pushback and pivot productively.
— Repair and reset working relationships after conflict.
Learning from real scenarios in one-on-one and multi-stakeholder settings, you will develop structured frameworks and microskills you can actually use in labs, research groups, internships, and jobs.
The class is highly interactive, emphasizes personalized feedback and growth, and is designed for students who want to build lasting skill in handling critical conversations across their professional journeys.
Questions? Contact Rachel Moore Best • rbest@mit.edu