Building purpose and trust in teams

“Purpose affirms trust, trust affirms purpose, and together they forge individuals into a working team.”

Stanley McChrystal, 4* general US Army, retired

This course is part of a series of 3 packages which, together, form a comprehensive leadership development programme.

It is designed to enable you to build a community or team whose sustainable performance is built on strong foundations of trust, mutuality, learning mindset and shared purpose.

This series offers the following:

Trust, mutuality and learning mindset - introduction

This course focuses on the core understanding of trust building, and the underpinning leadership skillset:

  • Understand what trust is, how it is formed and damaged, and the performance and wellbeing impact that high trust has on the workplace.
  • Build your confidence and skillset in the art of great listening and impactful questions - to build trust and mutuality with others.
  • Understand more about how your presence as a leader, facilitator, host or coach, impacts the trust 'bank balance' in a group.
  • Start to build your own learning inquiry and trust practice.

Using yourself as a generative and authoritative presence, which helps others to connect, trust and collaborate better, creates the right conditions for innovation, performance and wellbeing.

Trust, mutuality and learning mindset - advanced

This course helps you:

  • Understand growth (learning) mindset, which enables trustful learning and adaptive change, and its enablers and obstacles.
  • Focus on processes and behaviours that create and support dialogic, generative practices in the groups and teams you work with.
  • Explores how trust turns up differently in internationally diverse groups.
  • Build your confidence and competence at handling difficult situations and conversations.

Most people are conflict averse, believing that tackling the trickier sides of group-life (like poor performance, or diverse, even antagonistic views), will damage trust and belonging.  But if these are handled with skill, compassion and mutuality, they can be trust-building.

Building purpose and trust in teams

Once you have mastered the underpinning skills of trust and trust-building as a leader, facilitator, host or coach - you are ready to take the step in super-charging your team's performance, belonging and creativity - and that is supported by building common purpose, and strength-based innovation, change and adaptive capacity.

This course helps you:

  • Understand, in depth, what it means to work from a deep sense of personal and shared purpose - and the advantages this confers on your organisation or team, in the forms of greater resilience, innovation and adaptation, customer-centricity and performance, and reduced attrition, absenteeism and insider-risk.
  • Focus on processes and behaviours that you can adopt, that support and enable purposeful engagement.
  • Enhance your skills, with advanced techniques and approaches to refreshing your team's sense of purpose and values, and orienting them around strengths and commitments.
  • Build confidence in responding to (apparently) 'blocking' energy from others, with generativity, curiosity and engagement, thereby benefitting from the wisdom and accountability embedded in the 'resistance' and maintaining adult engagement.

If we are serious about a flourishing workplace, abundant with accountability, adaptability, energy and innovation - then we need to lead them with adult-adult dynamics, giving up the comfort of control and imposition, and instead embracing the richness of shared creativity.

Each course costs £100 if purchased separately.  You can purchase all three courses as a cost-effective 'bundle' priced at £250, by selecting any of the individual courses, and then upgrading at your basket/cart prior to checkout.  If you do this, please remember to take OUT the original course, before going through checkout.

Ready to jump in?

£100.00 inc VAT

Programme contents

  • Holding empty lesson to create sections
    0 minutes
  • Hosting, convening and facilitating
    180 minutes
  • The power of purposeful teams
    60 minutes
  • The power of purposeful teams – workshop templates for purpose, strengths and values
    60 minutes
  • Working positively with resistance
    120 minutes
  • Virtual Peer Support Groups – options
    12 minutes

This programme offers

Work through it in your own way - binge or nibble?

Some people like to 'binge learn', meaning that they allocate a whole day, and sink into a thorough immersion in a whole module.  Others prefer to take 2 hours per week, and work through a single lesson at a time.

Our courses are ideally suited to both - you are in control and you can work in the way you want, at the time you want.

Whatever your preference is, you are advised to book time in your diary, to ensure you get into a learning habit.

Different types of media to suit all needs

Each lesson will mix videos to watch, with material to read and explore.

Plus there are downloadable handouts, worksheets, templates and checklists to print and take away, and keep for future reference.

A little more about the 'lessons' included in this course ...

Want to find out more about the content in each of the packages?

Keep scrolling, you will find a summary of each element below. 

Want to talk to someone about how this might suit you?

14 + 4 =

More detail on each of the lessons

Hosting, convening and facilitating

This lesson explores the nature of the role of facilitator - or the activity of facilitation if you are a leader seeking to increase your competence when working with your teams and groups.  We will explore the different types of role, contract and activities that might be demanded of you when you are facilitating others in a wide range of situations - from workshops and events, through to peer learning groups for example.

We start however with the underpinning ideas of 'convening' and 'hosting' as a way of thinking about leadership in complex communities - a next step on from facilitation and of particular interest to those who are working with complex 'ecologies' of teams, or where you are seeking a genuine sense of co-ownership and creativity as part of (for example) Dialogic OD practice.  As our workplaces, communities and structures of governance become ever more complex, we need to learn new ways of bringing people together into powerful coalitions of strengths and accountable action.  This is where the work of the convener is an inspiring alternative to traditional management.

The power of purposeful teams, and the purposeful teams toolkit

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

In this pair of lessons, we stretch our leadership practice into the creation of purposeful teams.

Building on the work of people like Simon Sinek and others, we explore the nature and power of being more purposeful – leading with the WHY, and not just the HOW and the WHAT.

The first lesson in the pair brings you bang up to date with the core ideas, and the second offers a range of pragmatic tools, workshops and experiences that you can lead with your teams to focus on purpose, values and strengths.

Working positively with resistance, ambivalence, grief and anxiety

When confronted with a changing world - either because change is introduced deliberately, or because we are facing other external, potentially existential threats, dangers and losses forcing unwelcome adaptation, we have at best a legitimately ambivalent response, and will often be distressed, hostile or anxious. 

Empathetic, compassionate and deeply humane cultures have been shown again and again, to be more adaptive and resilient than those founded on self-interest or imposition of rational solutions without the human touch.

This lesson explores a number of different ways we can experience these things, often labelled "resistance" – including:

  • Resistance and denial, grief, shock, anger and loss.
  • Resistance and ambivalence set up by competing drivers and commitments – in effect two opposing "right" assumptions which block movement and change.
  • Resistance as wisdom – generative and legitimate information which, if engaged with, improves what we are trying to do.

Whether you are a leader, a coach or a facilitator/consultant - this invaluable understanding helps you to develop approaches that are rich with empathy, yet challenging in all the right ways - bringing the wisdom within the resistance to light, and resulting in mutual learning, growth and adaptation.

Ready to jump in?

£100.00 inc VAT

Frequently asked questions

How long can I access a programme or course?

Your programme, course or module will be accessible to you for 1 year from the time you start it.

However in each lesson there are also PDFs, tools, products and exercises, that we think you will want to keep – you can download them, or print them.

What if I fall behind and out of step with the programme timing?

All significant learning commitments require some dedication.  This means making conscious choices, and carving out the time to acquire, experiment with, and reflect on what you are exploring.  Sometimes, this is going to clash with other priorities and occasionally it might feel a little overwhelming – even for the most dedicated learner.  If you know that a busy period is coming up, plan for catch-up time in the weeks that follow.

Some of our longer programmes involve following a specific timetable with a group – with new modules ‘starting’ at a given time.  This may tie in with Peer Support Group meetings, and/or with workshops or webinars.  If this is the case for your programme, an important aspect is that you are not alone – but in a community of learners.  The timings of ‘live’ experiences or group meetings are rarely changed once the programme starts, as this would impact negatively on your colleagues and co-learners.  Keeping up with others, so that you share your learning and benefit from their experience, is important.

Get into the learning habit, and if you have concerns about whether you will be able to do this, and if you fall behind at any time, just reach out to us and we will try to help.

Can I bundle one course or programme with another and save money?

Some of our courses are already bundled, in particular the shorter courses shown in our ‘bitesize’ section.  If the course you are interested in IS available in a value-for-money bundle, proceed with your purchase, and before closing the ‘sale’, you will be notified of this choices at your ‘Cart’.

If the other courses you are interested in are not bundled right now, just contact us, as we can put a custom bundle together for you.

Can I commission custom courses for my organisation?

Many of our programmes and short (bite-size) courses have been originally developed especially for a client – and, where appropriate, then adapted for a broader audience and turned into an ‘open’ programme.  It is our clients around the world that ‘pull’ new content and commission what we go on to build, to meet their needs at any given time.

If you would like to either curate a custom programme from our existing stock, or you have an area of new content that you would like us to look at, just contact us and we can help.

What if I'm not satisfied with my purchase?

Our courses and materials are getting great feedback from users – but of course it might not suit exactly what you are looking for.

We are always happy to refund you if you start a course and find it isn’t what you wanted.  Please contact us straight after completing the first lesson in the course if you would like us to refund your payment or switch you to a more suitable product. 

Please note that we are unable to refund a course that has been more than 50% completed.