Team Launch Workshop

Create and Launch Empowered Cross-Functional Teams
On Vital Missions
In this Intensive, Comprehensive 5-day Workshop.

Workshop Purpose

Teams learn teamwork doing the team's work!

A small group of diverse people will form into an empowered, self-managed team in the course of doing their work—If they are:

Embracing a worthy challenge.
Committed to executing an important mission.
Well prepared with professional training and coaching.
Acutely aware of the threats and opportunities they face.

Real Teams are the fiercest competitors. Functional hierarchies are...orderly. Wise business managers use both—Real Teams to run a winning business AND the hierarchy to run an orderly business.

This workshop launches teams to help clients do that. It builds the team, guides the team through proven processes to produce a high-quality project plan, and it creates a very strong sense of commitment in the team to the successful execution of their plan.

Team Challenge: Uniting the Team

The magnet that draws team members together is the Team Challenge. All team members must agree that it is a worthy challenge; that achieving the Team Challenge will deliver results of high value to their business, and that most people would not achieve it.

They must engage together to plan and execute the team's mission to achieve the Challenge. And they must believe that they will learn trust, interpersonal skills, and team processes as a direct consequence of conceiving, planning, and completing their mission.

Coaching: Developing Team Strength and Confidence

What teams need most is guided practice on their real work to continuously improve their skills, processes and working infrastructure. We work like music teachers, or as athletic coaches. We motivate people to practice and to perform. We observe the results. We inject new skills and processes to practice next, we encourage team members to practice the new things, and they perform better next time.

But it's not generic coaching, as the current fads would lead one to believe. The Oregon Ducks, at home not far from our offices, have an excellent football coach. Chip Kelly does all that stuff in the preceding paragraph better than most football coaches. He helped the Ducks to win the Pac-10 football championship in 2009, his first season as head coach. But he would not be your best choice for training on classical guitar.

Coaches With Life Experience and Professional Experience

We combine business expertise with human behavior expertise, and put them to work training and coaching the rising stars. DeltaNet's Team Launch Workshop is delivered by a seasoned veteran with decades of successful experience in the business world and a social psychologist who understands very well how people behave in small groups and teams. It's a novel combination founded on the realization that the success of any business depends first and foremost on the performance of the people in the business.

It's hard to beat.

Synopsis of the Team Launch Workshop

Team Launch is a 5-day workshop. It is designed to form a team committed to a specific mission, and to guide the team through its formation and project planning. Team Launch uses a 3-stage process: Preparation, Primary Team Training, and Mission Planning.

Stage 1: Preparation

In advance of the first team meeting, DeltaNet consultants work with a variety of people in the client's organization to help develop the Team Challenge. A well-constructed Team Challenge is both difficult to achieve and worthwhile. It establishes the expectations of the team over the long haul, and it sets the overall constraints within which the team will be expected to work. The Team Challenge is the cause that the team will rally around.

The first use of the Team Challenge is to recruit team members. A well-constructed challenge will be exciting and motivating to prospective team members.

DeltaNet often helps the client organization to recruit and select team members. The team roster must represent all the significant stakeholder groups, those that will affect or will be affected by the team's work product. And the roster must include a broad diversity of functional skills, experience, and individual temperaments.

DeltaNet consultants also advise management on the development of the initial framework for a working environment that both nurtures the fledgling team and holds the team accountable.

Stage 2: Primary Team Training

Primary Team Training builds a common knowledge base among the team members and launches the development of the team skills and processes that members will need to succeed. It is facilitated by two DeltaNet consultants in an intensive 2-day session, usually the first 2 days of a 5-day Team Launch Workshop.

The Primary Team Training Module gives the team members:

A common understanding of the primary rational processes and interpersonal skills that team members need to achieve worthy challenges.
Practice in using those newly learned rational processes and interpersonal skills to solve a complex simulated problem.
A benchmark evaluation of the team's performance and behavioral style compared with hundreds of other teams that have faced the same simulation.

The evaluation also guides the selection and content of further training to strengthen the weaknesses discovered during the simulation.

At the end of Primary Team Training, team members will be aware of the skills they have and the skills they need to improve to work together more productively. They will have practiced those skills in a structured problem-solving situation, and they will be ready to continue to develop their new skills while doing the team's work.

Stage 3: Mission Planning

The Mission Planning Module is the final 3 days of the 5-day workshop. The team comes together and takes on a strong sense of project ownership and responsibility during Project Planning.

While practicing their new skills and while using their new processes, the team plans the best course of action, the timetable, and the resource needs to meet the Team Challenge. In many Team Launch Workshops, the team presents its mission plan to management during the afternoon of the final day.

Following the workshop, the team puts the finishing touches on the mission plan, secures management approval for the overall plan and for the next phase of work, and begins execution.

To Learn More, or to Arrange a Workshop

DeltaNet delivers the Team Launch Workshop as an in-house workshop only.
The teams work on real projects involving issues that cannot be revealed outside their company.
Public workshops are not appropriate.

To learn more about our Team Launch Workshop, or to arrange an in-house workshop,
go to Contact DeltaNet and use any of the methods listed there to reach us.