With Team Spirit, All Things Are Possible
Teams are potentially the most powerful human resource a company can call to action. When a group of individuals is given the opportunity to effectively merge its ideas, energies and ambitions toward a common vision or goal, anything — from the most difficult to the improbable to the seemingly impossible — can be achieved.
Reaching this potential in today’s corporate environment, however, is no small task. As employees are faced with downsizings, budget cuts, tighter schedules, heavier workloads, greater cultural diversity, and rapidly changing technologies, they find it increasingly difficult to meet responsibilities, let alone become animated and inspired to deliver extraordinary service.
Introducing Team Spirit:
A Proven Way to Create New Spirit in the Workplace
Team Spirit is a team development process that infuses both new and mature teams with exactly this sense of meaning and purpose. No longer merely functional — or dysfunctional — these “spirited” teams operate with visibly greater energy, enthusiasm, optimism, persistence, pride and joy. They produce more. They display greater ingenuity. In many cases, they provide a level of service to customers that actually astonishes and delights.
The Secret of Achieving These Qualities
In a workshop format, Team Spirit presents a simple, intuitive model of how teams actually function and thrive. It then provides stimulating exercises and a practical diagnostic tool that teams can use to keep themselves primed for peak performance. Most importantly, Team Spirit provides a safe, nurturing environment in which relationships can be strengthened, deepened and enjoyed, and powerful creative intentions unified.
The TEAM SPIRIT Spiral: A Model For Understanding Team Work
Team Spirit is based on the premise that every team’s activities consist of five critical, interrelated phases – Initiating, Visioning, Claiming, Celebrating, and Letting Go – that ultimately lead to Service. In Team Spirit, participants discover the significance of these phases and directly connect with each of them through a moving, experiential process.
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In phase one, Initiating, the Team Spirit experience fosters a deep sense of trust, belonging and interconnectedness amongst the team members. These qualities are essential to success, for every individual must feel needed, valued, respected and wanted if he or she is to contribute fully to the group. |
| In phase two, Visioning, Team Spirit enables the group to develop an expanded sense of its potential. Team members begin to envision what they can create together, begin to sense the possibilities for developing breakthrough solutions or delivering unparalleled service. Here they realize they can accomplish far more collectively than separately. |
| In phase three, Claiming, Team Spirit helps the team as a whole develop a sense of solidarity and single-minded purpose, while empowering individual team members to assume responsibility for the goals, roles, competencies and resources needed to realize their shared vision. |
| In phase four, Celebrating, Team Spirit increases the team members’ capacity to not only experience but acknowledge their sense of awe, wonder and appreciation for both their collective and individual accomplishments. This essential activity is often overlooked in traditional team building programs; yet only by openly celebrating a job well done can teams sustain or renew themselves. |
| In phase five, Letting Go, Team Spirit emphasizes the importance of each individual’s communicating with authenticity and forthrightness, especially with respect to disappointments, frustrations or conflicts. Withheld thoughts are gently urged out into the open, and constructive feedback is encouraged, with confidentiality being respected at all times. |
| In the sixth integrating phase, Service, Team Spirit fosters the team’s capacity to honor, value and contribute to both its members and its customers. The result is a furthering of the aims and intentions of customers in a manner that is consistently exemplary and often astonishing. |
Spirit of Service Workshop
Discover the Place Within You That Leads to Extraordinary Service
“Get all you can get.” “Milk it for what it’s worth.” “Might makes right.” “Overcome the competition.” “Win the battle.” “To the victor go all the spoils.” These are the voices and murmurs that echo through our companies, our culture, our nation, and all too often, our homes and family lives.
Spirit of Service Workshop suggests that the prevailing “survival of the fittest” paradigm that so imbues our lives is essentially disempowering and dispiriting. Spirit of Service Workshop asserts the following about the “survival of the fittest” paradigm:
- It is inherently flawed and erroneous thinking, based on fear.
- It neither acknowledges nor fosters the human spirit.
- It is the single greatest inhibitor of personal and organizational effectiveness.
- It misses the more fundamental human impulse that dwells in hearts and souls:. . . the impulse to serve.
The spirit of Service Workshop assists teams in realizing the possibility of becoming a spirited team through a shift in awareness, a shift in values, and a shift in the way teams work. Before the shift can take place, team members must recognize and confront the barriers of disempowering forces indicated in the “survival of the fittest” paradigm and be willing to move beyond the self. The workshop experience energizes the defining characteristic of the high-performing team – the trait that makes a team more than the sum of its members, the unseen but critical “spirit.”
Endorsements
Widely endorsed and recommended, Team Spirit has been successfully used by national organizations such as AT&T, Lexis/Nexis, The American Red Cross, NCR, General Motors, and the United Way. It is endorsed by the New Leaders Press in San Francisco, the Center for Servant Leadership in Indianapolis, and Creative Learning Technologies in Boise and is highly recommended by managers and consultants in the Organization Development and Human Resource Management fields.
“We used Team Spirit to turn a diverse group of twelve individuals into a high performing team in a very short period of time. The visioning, initiation and claiming phases helped us to quickly get clarity around our mission and establish group norms and responsibilities. Team Spirit improved the productivity and effectiveness of our team immensely.”
-Stan Sword, Client Partner, AT&T Solutions
“After experiencing Team Spirit our team has grown tremendously. We are more flexible in claiming our roles that allow us to achieve higher levels of performance. The Letting Go phase actually enabled us to grow deeper in trust of one another and has greatly improved our communications skills. I am profoundly grateful for the experience of Team Spirit.”
-Dr. Peggy Egan, Vice President, Franciscan Health Care System
“Team Spirit creates clarity of purpose, synchronization of roles, and resolution of issues. The result is a team that can really serve its customers well.”
-Chuck Malue, Director, Organization Development, NCR
“Our staff will never be the same! The experience we shared as part of Team Spirit has strengthened our bond. We are enriched and vitalized. Team Spirit certainly lives up to its name.”
-Linda Mercuri, Executive Director, Womanline
“Teams that have experienced Team Spirit seem to develop a commonality or oneness among themselves that didn’t exist before. I have seen this demonstrated in their overt application of Team Spirit and the increased effectiveness that this brings to the team. Team Spirit has enabled our teams to address very basic and difficult issues, such as diversity, in a much more open and trusting manner.”
-Joseph W. Payne, District Manager, AT&T Corporation
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