Growing Teams - Innolect, Inc.

Team Development

Leaders today are required to build and motivate cross-departmental or cross-border teams, while honoring diverse cultures and people. Leaders want high-performance team members who openly collaborate and seamlessly hand-off quality work.

Yet, teamwork skills don’t come naturally. Leaders must establish expectations and norms for high performance. To achieve high quality work, team members need to learn how to navigate with agility and collaborate productively. We help:

  • Accelerate cross-functional collaboration
  • Align goals and work processes to business strategy
  • Jumpstart new teams and team member integration
  • Build safe environments for risk-taking, effective conflict management and creativity
  • Gain higher engagement, commitment and trust by getting all voices heard
  • Cultivate shared accountability and end-to-end ownership
  • Reduce rework and duplication of effort
  • Clarify roles and responsibilities
Business People - Having Board Meeting In Modern Office

QuickStart: Supports Team Integration and Development

QuickStart is a team development process model designed specifically for senior management teams that have formed as a result of a merger or acquisition. Led by experienced Innolect organizational effectiveness consultants, QuickStart rapidly creates team identity, builds team trust, and establishes a high level of team efficacy. The speed of QuickStart enables teams to achieve aggressive short-term business goals and build the foundation for long term strategic success.

Team Building

While leaders envision seamless teamwork, many teams experience distrust, conflict and frustration. Inadvertently, some leaders encourage competition instead of cooperation. Team initiatives flounder when one of more team members take credit for the work, fail to follow-through, get distracted and/or waste time. Innolect helps overcome barriers and implement strategies to move teams to high-performance.

Innolect Approach - Customized, Collaborative Designs

  • Link the future to the past and learn from the past. We believe that what has been done in the past must be affirmed and honored before people are willing to commit to a desired, unknown future. We use a specific process to help people see that future possibilities are extensions of past achievements, and that we must not deny or devalue what we have learned. Where we can go is always connected to where we have been. 

  • Keep group in charge of its work and its decisions. It is most important that participants in this process "own" the experience. We use processes and activities that engage participants to influence what and how work gets done. Our role involves co-creating and facilitating a strategic thinking and decision-making process that leads to the outcomes team members choose and commit to achieve. 
Driven to Perform

Excursion Learning

Companies invest millions of dollars in teambuilding and off-sites each year. And, over 50% of attendees report no direct impact on improving work performance or effectiveness. At Innolect, we ensure teambuilding achieves the results you expect with higher ROI to improve both work performance and team effectiveness.

What is Excursion Learning℠? It is Innolect’s experiential, “Learn by Doing” approach that uses unique venues to stimulate collaboration, build trust, enhance communication and foster innovation. Not just another meeting, Excursion Learning℠ involves participants in activities and powerful conversations executive and their teams use immediately back on the job. The leaning offers value for weeks, months and years to come. Plus — it’s fun!

Representative Customized Experiences

Discover Your “HorsePower”

Using unfiltered, authentic insights from how horses respond to people, leaders discover subtle blind spots about how they’re perceived – because horses mirror leader behavior. Conducted at local equine facilities, Innolect’s facilitation team applies Equine Assisted Learning using hands-on activities on the ground to build self-awareness for personal learning and change. Participants:

  • Learn how behaviors of the “herd” mirror team behavior
  • Reflect on how horses and people respond to your leadership presence
  • Observe their natural leadership styles in building relationships and trust
  • Discover how “self-talk” works for or against leadership effectiveness
team walking

Go for the Greens: Win with Play

While professional golfers are experts, they are never satisfied with their “games.” Top golfers seek coaches who can “shave a few strokes off their rounds.” We use a “golf clinic” and  professional golfers to help leaders learn specific coaching skills to drive high-performing development for themselves and others. Leaders learn what it means to play to one’s strengths, target coaching to individual needs, receive feedback and plan for future goal setting —all while improving their golf game. Learn to:

  • Improve individual effectiveness and lower team scores (drive, pitch and putt) 
  • Apply what you learn with immediate feedback and reinforcement
  • Select and develop team members with differing skill levels
  • Navigate the course obstacles and rules of play 
  • Evaluate and share assets to maximize performance
Golf Tee Practice

Navigate Organizational Whitewater

Leaders experience consistent change, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Like navigating a whitewater river, just when leaders think they have negotiated the last rapid, they hear the thunderous roar of another rapid ahead. This whitewater rafting event, at the US National Whitewater Center, provides opportunities for participants to learn how to navigate through organizational complexity and change. Leaders and teams learn how to:

  • Collaborate efficiently
  • Gain insight for how to keep “talent” in the boat during times of uncertainty
  • Address and navigate classes of “business whitewater”
  • Respond to questions from direct reports 
  • Avoid “what ifs” and reduce fear of what might be around the next bend
whitewater rafting

Art at Work – Learning Agility and Collaboration

Art provides the ultimate test to put egos aside for the greater good. This excursion learning event builds collaboration practices within a studio setting. As participants co-design, co-create, and co-lead with experiential learning activities, they learn about workplace agility and collaboration. Teams learn to communicate and adapt in a dynamic, energizing environment. Participants learn how to: 

  • Apply learning agility and collaboration best practices
  • Build mutual understanding and trust
  • Encourage new ways of thinking and seeing 
  • Deepen relationships among individuals and teams
  • Rediscover a sense of playfulness and joy
art at work

Pit Crew Challenge: Driven to Perform

The key to racing success is the efficiency and effectiveness of their “pit crew.” We incorporate an authentic NASCAR challenge to pinpoint ways to improve enterprise performance back on the job. This highly interactive and physical program provides rich learning opportunities for work groups and leaders to collaborate with pit crew instructors and an actual NASCAR. Select this excursion to:

  • Explore best practices for building a high-performance team 
  • Engage individual strengths and talents to achieve a goal
  • Form new team norms and expectations
  • Gain deep understanding of personal style and impact
  • Enhance precision, speed, discipline and communication
Group Pit Crew Photo 10-20-04

Sustainable Legacies – Nonprofit Community Excursions

Companies often fail to capture ROI opportunities for volunteerism. While offering “feel good” engagement, forward thinking organizations can maximize the ROI from volunteer programs by ensuring the greatest impact of their CSR investments and “Paying It Forward.”

Innolect partners with nonprofits to create purposeful experiences that improve the lives of people and communities around the world. Our Sustainable Legacies Excursions provide “learning with a purpose experiences” by partnering with nonprofit organizations to develop leaders and teams.

Make a Difference! Partner with local nonprofits to encourage volunteerism and corporate social responsibility. 

Health and Wellness - Sole Hope
Put “closed” toed shoes on African children, one pair at a time to combat disease. Sole Hope provides shoes, medical clinics, and education, and offers jobs to indigenous people in Uganda. Participants build the components of shoes as individuals and teams work together in their self-designed production process. This valuable activity allows individuals to learn about their personal styles, collaboration, leadership and process improvement strategies.

Build and Integrate Team Members with Habitat
As a strategic nonprofit partner, Habitat for Humanity® offers an excellent venue for intentionally designed learning experiences to enhance team collaboration, build leadership talent and make a lasting impact. The Habitat experience provides excellent opportunities for teams and employee resource groups to develop skills and capabilities as leaders and leaders of leaders.

Customer Empathy: In Your Own Back Yard 
Do you want your employees to develop more compassion and greater skill in handling low-income issues? Do you want to raise awareness among community leaders about the challenges that low-income individuals and families face? To make a lasting difference, engage Innolect to facilitate a “poverty simulation experience.” The simulation, not a game, helps participants begin to understand what it is like to live in a typical low-income family trying to survive from month to month as people who are newly unemployed, recently deserted, homeless, senior citizens, disabled, single parents and more. 

women-s-build
2016-9-23 Sole Hope Beck and Gerri
Poverty Simulation

Ask about other excursions such as:

  • Team Turbocharging: BMW Driving Experience
  • The Great Escape: Virtual Reality
  • Customer Experience Challenge
  • Kitchen to the Boardroom: Discover Your Strengths
  • Back to the Future 
  • And more…

Facilitation

Experienced facilitators identify, anticipate and guide groups toward productive communication dialogues and desired meeting outcomes. Innolect’s experienced facilitators anticipate and read the room in the moment to ensure meetings are productive and groups achieve desired outcomes for:

  • Conflict and Change Situations
  • Strategic Thinking and Organizational Alignment
  • Problem Solving and Decision Making

Our Master Facilitators:

  • Ask the right questions
  • Use structured methodologies to gain agreement and commitment
  • Offer a neutral third-party perspective 
  • Help address confidential business threats, legal issues and strategic opportunities
  • Employ technology to engage virtual stakeholders
  • Create a safe environment for dialogue and to confront thorny issues head on

Important Internal Meetings

Careful planning and preparation are essential to maximize meeting effectiveness. External facilitators often help teams gain insights and spend their meeting time productively. We use time-tested tools and techniques to help teams achieve tangible results. We focus on the right issues and avoid groupthink and other cognitive biases to reach agreement on actions. Typical sessions:

  • Increase cross-functional collaboration
  • Build safe environments for risk-taking and effective conflict management
  • Foster trust & commitment by getting all voices heard
  • Cultivate shared accountability and end-to-end ownership
  • Align goals and processes to business strategy
  • Stimulate interdependency to achieve goals
  • Foster creativity and innovation
client photo
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Corporate Off-sites and Conferences

When senior management, boards of directors or sales organizations want a corporate meeting, they invite Innolect to facilitate customized designs. We understand the significant investment of time and money. We partner with and listen to clients, then work to determine the best ways to accomplish their goals using fresh, innovative meeting design. With most clients, we conduct assessments during the design phase. We use focus groups, phone interviews or questionnaires to target our format and approach. Using our experience and industry best practices, we:

  • Ensure the right people are included for governance, expertise and involvement
  • Prepare to ensure clear desired outcomes and success measures
  • Design the “right” activities, given the people, facilities and time available
  • Provide structure and engage the right subject matter experts
  • Offer proven decision-making approaches to ensure groups arrive at results that are jointly created, understood and accepted 
  • Build a shared experience for learning and transformation
  • Adapt in the moment to meet highest priority objectives
  • Increase chances for getting actual work done

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