Promoting Collaboration and Communication in Teams

Strategic Partnering with Teams

Holon Consulting services include facilitating teams and team members in their development since 1984.  This includes coaching to individuals to increase effectiveness in their work role, and to clarify/resolve work issues. The team’s foundation rests on the development of shared vision, mission, goals, roles, issue resolution and action planning.

What Gifts Do We Have For Each Other?

The greatest gift we offer is the new information that our diverse perspectives hold, along with the energy and time that is required to identify and resolve issues together. Through our shared experience, wisdom and creative energies, we help each other grow, learn and co-create new alternatives in a way not possible by ourselves alone.

To change or “get out” of the box, requires that we work together to see the large picture of where we are, how we got there, where we want to go and how to get to that new place.

Holon Consulting services use the following process to design and facilitate team building meetings:

• Understand the team’s purpose, the team building objectives and challenges, and the underlying issues and group dynamics of the team members (speak with team leaders beforehand)
• Propose appropriate team building tools and co-design team building meeting agenda with team leaders
• Begin with introductions and check-in (why is each team member there?) and have meeting participants set the guidelines (i.e. safety, openness, shared participation etc.) for a meeting environment that will support accomplishing the team building objectives
• Facilitate team building session(s): complete agreed upon agenda items, always checking the energy level, the body and verbal language for on-the-spot feedback, and make changes in pace/format etc. as feedback indicates
• Develop action plans (what, responsible person and by when) for all team related issues and agreements, which were generated during the session
• Close with planning or clarification of next team building steps, session evaluation and closing comments

Benefits:

• We assess the needs of the team and design processes to address them. We have found that individuals are sometimes more willing to discuss issues with a third party than with other members of the team.
• A third party can often observe the team’s functioning more objectively than the members. We are experienced with giving teams feedback about our observations in a non-threatening manner. We don’t leave the matter there; we help teams find ways to resolve issues.
• We use the real work of the team, rather than irrelevant simulations or games, as the focus of our facilitation.
• Our role is to guide the team to find solutions to its problems: the responsibility for effective team development rests with the team. Thus, teams are not reliant on us; they will learn the skills to solve future problems without our intervention.
• We help the team implement processes they can use to achieve their goals. These processes might include agenda building, team charter, problem-solving techniques, and team evaluation tools.
• We can provide one-on-one coaching to the team leader after our facilitation. We coach the leader to improve his/her facilitation skills and keep the team on track.

“In dialogue, individuals gain insights that simply could not be achieved individually.”
-Peter Senge