Increasing Team Effectiveness
A county government agency facing rapid growth and community expansion reached out to Northwood Consulting to help it sustain its success in managing the growth and build resilience into the organization to enable it to manage the unexpected. With its two top executives retiring in the next several years, the management team wanted to strengthen its ability to work together rather than as independent entities.

The group was becoming frustrated that it wasn’t meeting its own expectations to introduce new initiatives to strengthen the organization. Northwood Consulting had the group complete a series of assessments in addition to talking with each manager to reveal the team’s culture and value systems. We discovered there was a shared desire within the group to be more strategic and enterprising, but those capacities and systems were not currently active within the group.

By revealing the team’s dynamics to itself, we were able to help them recognize the breakdowns in their expectations, interactions and ability to collaborate as a team. This insight helped them to recommit to working as a team and to restructure the team to be more effective.

Discovering the Future
A rapidly growing family-owned business hit the wall when it started to outgrow its business systems and small company culture. Adding to the complexity was a transition from the first generation founder to the next generation of family leaders.

Northwood Consulting was brought in to work with the two future leaders to help them strengthen their relationship to enable them to mutually lead the company. After completing the PeopleScan assessments, the two sons discovered they were working from different value systems from one another and their father, which created conflict, distrust and low morale within the company.

This insight enabled them to start developing a strategy for the company’s future sustainability based on the cultural dynamics of the organization and the individual family members. One action they took was to bring in a manager with the capacities to work in a more complex environment, who is now creating new working conditions that is allowing more creative thinking and problem solving.

Inspiring Teamwork
A major national nonprofit organization in Washington DC needed to rebuild its development department after a divisive manager left. The new Program Director inherited a department rife with mistrust and poor internal staff communication.

Northwood helped the Director develop a plan to re-invigorate the staff by successfully building confidence and trust that allows the department to work as a team. In addition, Northwood helped create a staff retention program.

At the end of the coaching program, the department was fully staffed, morale greatly improved, the group was meeting its goals, and turnover had been reduced to zero over a two year period.

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