The most effective teams achieve a synergism that yields results greater than the sum of each individual's contribution. Effective teams don't just happen. Communication, shared leadership and facilitation, role negotiation, and other critical skills must be learned and practiced regularly. Unfortunately, many teams become "stuck" as they form and evolve and members either give up on the team or the team drags down the productivity of its members.

Our team-building training and team facilitation services help a team to:

	Understand the roles and contributions of its members.
	Identify its goals, needs, boundaries, strengths, weaknesses, and barriers to effective functioning.
	Know which decisions are made best by teams and which are made best by individual members.
	Learn ways to overcome or minimize barriers.
	Improve team communication, decision-making, meeting efficiency, and documentation.
	Stimulate discussions about critical team performance issues.
	Focus action and planning to help improve team effectiveness.

The Center for Executive Solutions offers a range of services that help organizations cultivate highly effective teams.

• Team-member Selection - Whether our clients are building an advisory board, senior management team, cross-functional work unit, or other group, we advise them on how to select team members with the right combination of skills and attributes to achieve the desired results.
• Team-skills Training and Team-building - Our team skills training and team building workshops help executives learn and practice techniques for optimizing team performance. We also work with executives to enhance the capabilities of entire leadership teams. We maximize the impact of group time by assigning pre-work and by interviewing participants individually in advance of the group meeting(s). Additionally, we work with clients to create and implement tools, such as the Guide to Working With Me, that help team members communicate their work styles, values, and shortcomings and as well as what they are looking for in other teammates.
• Assessments - Like a professional sports team that reviews its past games, teams periodically must assess their performance to find ways to improve. We facilitate team assessments to uncover where teams are doing well and what changes are needed to better accomplish the team's mission.
• Conflict Resolution - Teams fraught with conflict waste time, energy, skills, and money. We help prevent and resolve conflicts so team members are more likely to share constructive feedback, information, skills, and assistance. We help build team unity, while simultaneously capitalizing on diversity and avoiding "group think."
• Meeting Facilitation - Skilled facilitation can help ensure that strategic planning sessions, executive retreats, and other high-stakes meetings elicit a full range of participation and achieve meaningful results that justify the significant costs of such meetings. We assist with clarifying meeting goals, developing agendas, facilitating constructive dialogue, navigating potentially sensitive issues, documenting discussion points, and preparing specific action plans that will lead to meaningful and lasting change.