Team Building...

The best-laid plans often fail because of poor execution. Poor communication and lack of cooperation between people and departments who need to work together are often the culprits. Team building sessions are the most effective and efficient way of seeing underlying dynamics that can lie hidden for years. Such destructive behavior erodes productivity and profitability and like a sinkhole, these conditions will worsen with time until finally causing a collapse.

Rather than engage a consultant in a long and expensive assessment that produces a report from an expert about what is wrong, team building exercises in real-time make roadblocks abundantly clear. No more hiding or pointing fingers--accountability and cooperation ensue. People are performing as a team, objectives are realized, and your company's bottom line will show it.

A CEO of a company in downtown Chicago hired Real Talk to help improve the culture.

We started with interviews to get the lay of the land, and to a person, each manager said the same thing: "We don't talk to each other." There was a lot of finger pointing and rumor-mongering, and no one was having much fun at work. Everyone was afraid to discuss these problems and productivity was suffering. One, because they didn't know who to talk to, and two, the problems seemed intractable. It was just sort of "the way things were" at XYZ Company.

They had never had a meeting in which any employee could put a topic on the agenda and  the agenda was set in real-time at the beginning of the meeting. The group was encouraged to list all the issues that needed to be discussed, and the facilitator skillfully listened to each persons' point of view. Before long, a picture emerged of what the real problems were, and one by one novel solutions emerged. Myths faded about certain managers being "unapproachable", and departements functioning as silos began to see how they were affecting each other.

A year later, they are still having "Kay" meetings. They have learned how to listen to each other, and be accountable to each other. It's fun to come to work again, and employees are recruiting their friends and family because its a great place to work.