Team Building
"Staff members are communicating who previously wouldn't speak to each other. This workshop was interactive and engaging — significantly different from anything we've tried before."
Wiley Carter
Seattle Public Schools
One of our primary strengths is in team building—which we consider an invaluable need for any group that wants to successfully pursue and accomplish common goals.
Individuals that come together with disparate perspectives, backgrounds, ideas and personalities need an opportunity to recognize themselves as a cohesive team. Without an effective sense of team belonging, it is difficult to identify and accomplish common goals and easy to overlook important unexpressed needs.
Whether the purpose is to oversee a project, build a house, guide an organization, or carry out the responsibilities of a division, groups are more effective, efficient and engaged when they function as a team. We custom design team development experiences that range anywhere from two-hour workshops to week-long team development courses.
Every group has a unique set of personalities and needs. We help teams identify where they are and where they need to go.
We are skilled at helping new groups come together as a team:
Habitat For Humanity's incredible work building houses with families in need is made possible by countless volunteer hours. Ilana was invited to help a group of Americorps members come together as they developed their own facilitation skills working with groups of Habitat for Humanity volunteers.
We help existing teams address difficult issues that are barriers to performance:
Ilana spent a day with the Internal Training Division of a large financial institution in which the group norms were not particularly conducive to dealing with a heavy workload.
After a one-day workshop, the team experienced some significant changes:
· The team noticed an increase in productivity, as energy that had been diverted to inter-personal conflict was re-directed to the tasks at hand.
· Individuals that previously avoided each other started having lunch together.
· Team meetings became far less tense and more light-hearted and enjoyable.
· A few members self-identified a lack of commitment to the organization and choose to leave, allowing the director to bring in new talent and drive.
High functioning teams bring Ilana in to help them identify and enhance their successful work processes:
We facilitated three retreats for the staff of Kestrel Vintners, an award-winning winery in central Washington. This small, high-functioning team used their annual event to acknowledge the successes of the past year, build momentum for the upcoming season and enhance their already successful work processes, relationships and results.
We help teams bring their collective work to completion, ensuring the longevity of their creation(s), the on-going development of individual members and the identification of new priorities:
Passages Northwest works with a variety of groups "educating and motivating girls to develop leadership and courage." As their school-based programs come to closure, we helped teams acknowledge their collective and individual achievements and challenges, as well as set goals for on-going development.
Teams experiencing change often need to re-group. Ilana helps groups capitalize on change as an opportunity to revitalize:
As with many large organizations, teams within The Boeing Company undergo constant shifts in their membership. Promotion, transfers, lay-offs and new rounds of hiring mean that groups experience periods of flux. Ilana's work with a Boeing leadership development program helped a group of emerging leaders address shifts within their own team compositions as well as personal shifts within the supervisory hierarchy. Re-establishing working agreements, negotiating new roles and shifting priorities are all part of the healthy development of teams experiencing change.