Training and Consulting

Positive Diversity founder, Scott Boone, delivers a train-the-trainer session for staff who will implement the Exploring Teamwork Essentials program. Grounded in actual program experience, this training experience will create confidence in your staff and great connections between them. As a result, they will be more inclined to support each other throughout the year, improving the effectiveness of your department. The session runs three hours, and can be expanded if you desire to add a customized component to address additional priorities. For example, a team development component can be added that explores communication norms or conflict resolution styles among staff.

Additionally, some departments may desire to experience the benefits of Exploring Teamwork Essentials for their own benefit and as a way to deeply understand how it can best be deployed in the institution. Engagements can also transcend team development and delve into identification of strategies and programs for effectively managing student or staff diversity.
Our training is guided by five basic assumptions:

1. Interpersonal behavior is rather difficult to change. Learned from one’s culture, rooted in personality, and hard-wired within our brain’s synaptic connections, our preferred communication style and norms do not change with the flip of a switch. As adults, we are not soft lumps of clay, easily transformed.
2. Training that provides interpersonal behavior-change prescriptions to improve team or personal effectiveness is largely misguided by well-intended optimism. It is usually not cost effective.
3. Team development should first focus on generating personal and team self-awareness and creating an understanding of similarity and an appreciation for differences. Teams that develop a respect for differences in styles, preferences, and capabilities stand a greater chance for success than a team trained in behavior prescriptions. An early goal is to deeply understand “who we are” vs. pursuing “whom we should become.”
4. We are capable of adapting behavioral tendencies in a team setting, especially when provided greater awareness of self and others. How we choose to adapt is largely an internal pursuit, generally not achieved through training. Experience is the best teacher for developing inter-personal team skills.
5. Once respect for individual members established, teams are then best positioned to realize the benefits of team development tools rooted in process, such as brainstorming, conflict management, decision-making, and creative dialog techniques.

Please contact Scott Boone to explore options for a great training or consulting experience. scott@positivediversity.com or call 248-348-9312.