Coaches With Life Experience and Professional Experience

DeltaNet applies seasoned veterans with decades of experience in the business world to train and coach teams. It's a novel concept: Take people who have already experienced a successful career, team them with a social psychologist to add the human perspective, and put them to work training and coaching the rising stars.

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 the various people in the client 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 advises 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 provides initial development of team skills and processes. It is facilitated by two DeltaNet consultants in an intensive 2-day session, usually the first 2 days of a 5-day workshop.

The Primary Team Training Module gives the team members:

• A common understanding of the primary rational process and interpersonal skills that teams need to perform effectively.
• Practice in using rational processes and interpersonal skills to solve a controlled, simulated problem.
• A benchmark evaluation of the team's performance and behavioral style compared with hundreds of other teams that have run 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 are aware of the skills they have, 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 are ready to continue to develop their new skills while doing the team's real 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.