“In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.”
~ Margaret Wheatley
Joanne assists leaders and their teams to become top-performing, inspiring “hotspots” within their organizations. She facilitates team visioning, strategic planning, alignment and problem solving processes, as well as team building, development, turnaround and re-formation processes. She inspires passion, commitment, creativity and possibility thinking in her facilitation, unleashing the inherent greatness in the team, both individually and collectively.
Joanne creates a highly creative, open and energized atmosphere in her style and way of engaging the teams she works with. She effectively guides and holds the space for creative problem solving around any issues and challenges that inhibit the team from reaching their highest potential. She effectively balances team process with task and forward movement, taking the team wherever it needs to go to accomplish their objectives.
Working collaboratively with the leader to identify desired outcomes, her process can include any or all of the following elements:
- Clarify team/organization identity, culture and brand.
- Identify team guiding values – what they deem most important.
- Articulate a vision and/or mission that aligns with both the team identity and values, as well as with the larger organization of which the team is a part.
- Identify the desired “future state” – what the team wants to look like and by when.
- Identify key strategies and flush out the plan of action to get there.
- Identify measures for success, means to track progress and instill accountability.
- Identify needed resources and people, roles and responsibilities, etc.
- Identify and creatively problem solve around obstacles/challenges.
- Identify and/or refresh team agreements, where each member holds the others accountable.
- In the moment coaching on any aspect of team dynamics or needed skill development.
Prior to the offsite or retreat, Joanne conducts customized interviews with team members as well as administers a team effectiveness inventory, in instances when gathering this qualitative and quantitative input is deemed of value to accomplishing the desired outcomes.
The following are examples of outcomes Joanne has helped teams achieve through her facilitation:
- Achieved a turn around and positive breakthrough in team attitude and morale. All issues related to attitude, trust and morale have been addressed.
- Identified, agreed and committed to strategies, actions and best practices to ensure the team sustains this new level of functioning, including the creation of team ground rules and agreements around processes moving forward.
- Achieved clarity and alignment around what defines and how to evaluate success, top priorities, and roles and responsibilities.
- Achieved clarity on how to maximize the impact team can make to the continued success of the company.
- Each team member and the team overall:
- Experienced being stronger, healthier, happier and feeling energized, empowered and united. Being energized included a commitment to a plan of action of what each will do.
- Gained clarity about what each person’s role is as part of team, aligned with leader’s expectations.
- Increased skill in influence and identified the strategy for influencing others outside the team.
- Experienced the team as in top “performing” mode.
- Reconnected to their passion, motivation and inspiration for what they do, and experienced a greater sense of fulfillment and contribution to the overall enterprise.
- Each manager left with a plan of action to communicate back to their respective teams, including consistent communication of all agreements and decisions reached at the offsite.
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi ~ 13th century Sufi mystic and poet
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