Course Overview

This strategic planning course for teams will:

  • Surface a team’s purpose.
  • Help teams identify their current strengths and opportunities.
  • Recognize team strengths.
  • Explore collaboration and offer solutions to dysfunctional behaviors that prevent people from working well together.
  • Provide a forum for teams to envision the future.
  • Offer suggestions for managing change.

Course Overview

This course is designed for teams who are interested in evaluating their current state, confirming or defining their focus, and considering how they will need to adapt in the future.  The program is filled with exercises to help group members get a clear picture of their present and prepare and plan for transition and change.  Working together, we will consider internal forces, external forces, and what motivates the team.  We will also identify any obstacles and create a plan to overcome those roadblocks.

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Explain the team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
  • Leverage team strengths.
  • Define collaboration and empowerment.
  • Identify communication and process roadblocks and provide solutions to those obstacles.
  • Conduct “future-casting” sessions.
  • Prepare for and manage change.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Keep on Moving: Preparing to Think

Teams that stay stagnant fall behind.  This program begins with an exercise in innovative thinking and a discussion about planning for the future.  In this part of the workshop, participants will tackle a design challenge that forces them to find multiple solutions to the same problem.  At the end of the activity, we will discuss lessons learned, set the agenda for the session, and talk about leveraging strengths, adopting and adapting solutions, and overcoming roadblocks.

The Current State: Understanding Where We Are

This seminar segment looks at the team’s present state.  The group will discuss their organization’s big picture and articulate where they fit within that mission.  Next, they will consider the group’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. After this section of the course, the group should have a clear image of its current state.

Know the Players: Team Member Styles

Without people, there is no team. For that reason, people need to know how to work together. In the third portion of this workshop, we will look at people styles.  Participants will complete an individual assessment to identify their preferred approach to workplace communication.  We will then map the entire team’s preferences on a grid for the purpose of discussing the group’s communication, its processes, and potential areas of conflict and disagreement.

Collaboration Station: The Look and Sound of Working Together

All the style training in the world can’t help a group that doesn’t make an effort to get along.  This part of the program explores team cooperation and collaboration.  To begin the discussion, participants will complete a short survey and define the behaviors associated with a collaborative team.  Next, we will take a close look at cooperation, knowledge sharing, listening, respect, delivering on promises, challenging the status quo, and avoiding negativity. Working together, group members will identify behaviors that contribute to, or detract from, a positive and nimble workplace.

Preparing for What’s Next: Future Casting

As the exercise in the first segment illustrates, there are lots of ways to get to the same destination.  However, those paths will do you no good if you’re going to the wrong place. In this portion of the course, we will discuss scenario planning and work through a series of exercises to talk about the short-term and long-term future of the organization.  We will then discuss changes the team should prepare to make in the coming months and years.

Managing Change: Working Through Transitions

Transitions can cripple a team if its members are not prepared.  This final part of the program looks at change management.  We will examine the change cycle, reactions to change, tactics for generating buy-in, and communication tactics that produce positive results.

By the conclusion of this program, team members should have a renewed sense of purpose, skills for collaborating and leveraging each other’s strengths, a vision for the future, and tools for implementing and managing change.