Teamwork Programs
We offer teamwork programs that go beyond the typical remedial team building program. Instead, our programs are aimed at fuller, more meaningful team development experiences. See Beyond Team Building for a fuller description of the philosophy behind the design of our team programs.
* Indicates program is a part of our Curriculum for Sustainability.
Team Building Aboard A Tall Ship
McVinney and Company has joined with Tom and Kay Ellis, owners and operators of the Thomas E. Lannon, a 90 foot schooner, which sails out of Gloucester Harbor in Gloucester, Massachusetts, to offer an exciting new approach to event based team development programs. The team building sails are an adventurous way learn about one another and discover a great deal about what makes teams successful. During recent summers, teams from both large and small companies have joined us to take part in these excursions.
Sailing together on a Tall Ship brings out the best in the team, while revealing where the team is challenged to improve. On board, the team learns how to navigate, set and control sails, steer the boat, and manage other technical aspects and decision making necessary to insure a safe trip. Not generally as risky as some adventures, and not as predictable as others, the tall ship experience allows teams to work together at something meaningful in the outdoors while practicing new skills of listening and learning together. As one of our recent customers said of the activity:
“This is not about ropes and bars contrived to build trust or teach some point out of context; this is real. You either succeed at getting the boat out of the harbor, to its destination, and back safely and on time — or you don't.”
Learn more!
Creating Effective Teamwork
The problem with most training that addresses the so-called "soft skills" of people management is that there is never any follow-up, reinforcement, or application coaching to support participants after they leave the live training program. In addition, there are usually no measurement tools to track the effectiveness with which training participants use the skills after leaving the training environment.
McVinney & Company has solved this dilemma by combining the best team development training available in the marketplace with a dynamic and thorough on line coach, complete with tools and guidelines for applying and measuring everything taught in the live program.
The three-day training is the most comprehensive available for leaders and members of small project teams and large standing teams alike. The course itself is interactive, discovery-driven, and tools-based. It allows participants to learn the best concepts and practices being used in successful teams today, and to tailor those benchmark strategies to their own operational teams.
This program is offered as an in-house program only. We encourage you to invite team leaders and members from all over your organization to attend, so that cross-teaming can be advanced and modeled as the participants learn to identify and apply the most effective tools available to their own team challenges.
After the three-day live training, each participant has access to the On-Line Coach for Team Leaders. This coach is a full web site in its own right that we make available to you to for your own intranet. The site is over a 100 pages of reinforcement, application and measurement tools and techniques that can be used when ever they want or need it. The site is easy to use - totally accessible, and always at your fingertips.
*Creating, Facilitating, and Sustaining Teamwork
Effective teams don't just "happen." Instead, they are carefully nurtured into existence and systematically supported throughout their life cycle. From the sophisticated launch process to the ongoing developing of team skills and attributes, leaders need to be on top of a complicated array of dynamics and events that shape and change teams constantly. This program provides practical models and applicable templates for selecting, launching, developing and sustaining teams. Whether your teams are co-located task forces or virtual teams spread across geography and time, the tools we introduce will make a huge difference to your daily team management and leadership. Furthermore, since diversity is among the most important tools the leader has to work with in shaping teams into highly effective forces within organizations, we address how it can become a positive force. Assessment and feedback tools are included, and several interactive activities and exercises highlight the team development model at work.
*Creating and Sustaining Executive Teams
The literature on executive teams is not flattering. The evidence is that the top leaders seldom create the teams they want other groups in the company to be. The top, after all, is a place you typically get to through competition and self-reliance, or at best, by building tight networks of power and affiliation. This program addresses key issues raised when leaders are called on to collaborate with other top leaders. As such, we facilitate executives as they work to build their teams around a commitment to common goals and to the success of everyone. The program highlights and pursues the skills of creative thinking, and applies those skills to the challenges of creating sustainable organizations.
Sustaining Teamwork:
A Workshop for Team Leaders
After the launch and far into the project, what keeps teams motivated and thriving? How do effective teams stay that way, and resist the doldrums? When team leaders are called on to revitalize groups that have been together through thick and thin, what obstacles do they encounter and what tools do they use to overcome them? How do team leaders handle coming and going of team members, shrinking of budgets, loss of project priority? These are a few of the things that can derail teams and teamwork over time. Furthermore, the same things that undermine project teams also undermine standing departments. Leaders need to think through and manage these contingencies if they are going to build sustainable enterprises.
McVinney & Company announces a one day intensive team leader training program designed to support leaders of long term project teams and standing departments as they deal with the paradoxes and setbacks that can work to undermine the efforts to build durable teams. In this program, which is highly interactive and steeped in practical techniques, participants will learn to:
- Identify the conditions that can evolve in teams that can threaten them;
- Recognize and deal effectively with 7 major team paradoxes that emerge over time;
- Identify and enhance personal leadership skills and attributes that contribute to team longevity and sustainability;
- Acknowledge and address communication issues and problems specifically applicable to teams in their mid and later life cycles;
- Apply the three core principles of sustainable organizational development to the practical decisions of everyday team leadership.
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