Team development aims to build resilient and flexible teams in order to rapidly adjust to internal and external business dynamics.

Teams

Leadership teams are unique entities with distinct dynamics. Impactful team development takes place within the current business challenges and considers the team’s personal interactions, ability to collaborate, and strengths.

Our solutions and processes are customized to achieve the team’s goals. We create alignment on business outcomes, practice and model conscious leadership, and build trust to create a cohesive culture within the larger organization.

Catalysts for Team Development

As business contexts shift, so do leadership teams and their business outcomes. Having an impartial professional can assist in achieving goals and opening a path to enhance the leadership in important ways.

  • Aligning a new leader’s team with shared values, strategic goals and a common leadership framework
  • Integrating new team members for accelerated onboarding and team cohesiveness
  • Building collaboration and trust among team members
  • Integrating teams and organizations through a merger or acquisition process
  • Increasing commitment and engagement of the team members
  • Adopting innovations, new practices and approaches
  • Utilizing an outside expert to act as a sounding board, facilitator, and co-creator to maximize team results

How Team Development Works

No team or organization is exactly the same; each has unique outcomes and intent behind the desire for team development. After assessing and identifying key strengths and challenges in the current environment, we partner with the executive sponsors to co-design outcomes, while providing additional insights and opportunities to achieve results. Solutions commonly include a combination of 1:1 coaching or change consulting with key leaders and facilitated team meetings addressing business and leadership challenges.

What ‘floats my boat’ is when teams take risks to be vulnerable and face their challenges head on. The dramatic shifts I have witnessed have blown me away.

 

What our clients say about us

“When I was promoted to lead a new team, Debra helped support the development of our strategic plan and provided guidance to ensure that we worked together to achieve our goals. During times of incredible change and turnover, Debra helped to keep the team aligned and gave us tools to enhance our communication and approach to conflict resolution. We were able to overcome our interpersonal conflicts and built a successful plan.”

Michelle Simpson | SVP, Employer Markets
Blue Shield (2014-2016)

“It all comes down to clarity. Our job as leaders is to provide clarity for the people in our organizations. And if the senior team isn’t aligned, it’s hard to provide clarity. We engaged Debra Bowles and team to get our senior leadership aligned around a clear vision and strategy for our organization. The process we were guided through brought us together as a team and strengthened our individual and collective capacity to create clarity and lead change.”

Debbie Alvarez-Rodriguez |
 President/CEO
Goodwill of San Francisco
San Mateo and Marin (2002-2012)

Why team development?

Sheldon Kimber | COO
Recurrent Energy 2011-2014

As COO, my mandate was to bring consensus to a disparate group of departments with a clear history of conflicts and blame. Debra’s work with my team began with me. Her coaching made it clear that I needed to redefine my own success as that of my team. With this in mind, Debra helped me to break away from the daily fire drills to design thoughtful and challenging off-sites for my team. We slowly pulled together a group of people who had been adversaries with a focus on how each of them could succeed only if we all did.

Debra was a partner to me and my team in this process. She gave us the structure, perspective and facilitated the discussions (and sometimes arguments) between the team. While she was not an expert in our industry, she was able to draw parallels from her own experience along with her coaching and team development expertise.

 

The results of this were astonishing. We broke down barriers between construction and engineering teams and eliminated the finger pointing and blame that is inherent between those two functions. We integrated our business development and pro forma project analysis with our technical team so that we got aggressive, but reasonable estimates for the purposes of bidding on and winning new business. In short, we built one of the highest performing teams in our industry by mitigating some of the most common difficulties of integrating technical and sales functions.