Coaching & Workshops
New teams do not become teams because of an org chart. This session gets a newly formed or newly merged group to agree how they will actually work together, in one sitting, rather than discovering it over a painful year.
Why it matters
After a restructure or an acquisition, people keep the habits of the group they came from. Different standards, different tools, different assumptions about what good looks like and who decides. Nobody discusses it, so every difference becomes a small friction that never gets named.
Left alone this settles into permanent factions. The team develops an unspoken pecking order based on where people came from, and the manager spends a year translating between groups who each think the other is doing it wrong.
What the session covers
In the room
Explicitly. The differences are the whole problem and they are much easier to resolve once they are on a whiteboard.
How decisions get made, who needs to know what, and how disagreement is handled. Agreed rather than assumed.
What the team will do differently starting Monday, with a check-in date to see whether it held.
Signs you need this
Six months is roughly when this hardens. After that the factions are no longer about process differences, they are about identity, and the session gets much harder.
If two or three of these are true you are past the point where it resolves on its own. None of them are unusual, and all of them are cheaper to fix than to wait out.
Sound familiar
Afterward
Decisions, escalation, meetings and standards agreed in a room rather than fought out over a year.
The habits each group brought, surfaced deliberately instead of colliding one at a time.
Short and specific, with a check-in date. The date is what makes it stick.
How it runs
The whole team plus its manager, including anyone joining in the next month. Best run within four weeks of the structure being announced.
Sessions run on site or virtually, and they are built around situations attendees bring rather than case studies from a textbook. You get a fixed fee before we start, and the person who scopes it is the person who delivers it.
Practicalities
Questions
As soon as the new structure is announced. Within the first month is ideal. It works later but you are then unpicking habits.
No. There are no trust falls. It is a working session that produces a written agreement about how the team operates.
Yes, and that is one of the strongest use cases, because the cultural differences are largest and least discussable.
A full day for a merged team. Half a day if the group is small or already partly working together.
Then run this alongside new-leader assimilation, so the leader lands and the team forms at the same time.
No, but expect a harder session. We spend more time on what has already calcified and less on prevention.
Then that needs airing first and we build time for it. A charter written over unexpressed resentment does not survive contact with the first disagreement.
It is not team building. It produces a working agreement, and teams generally get on better once they stop guessing at each other's standards.
Related
When the team is new and so is the person leading it.
New-Leader Assimilation →The wider integration work after two organizations combine.
Workforce Transition →Senior-led, delivered by the person you meet
Tell us what changed and when, and we will scope a session. No obligation, and we will say if one of the others fits better.
Tell us what is going on