Maven

Team Lesson: Plan A Powerful Team Offsite

Google

Harvard Business Review

Rachel Cai

Expert facilitator at Maven

Discuss the #1 most important question to align on outcomes, using a collaborative worksheet

Articulate your desired outcomes as a team

You'll master a proven framework to find similarities and discuss differences in your venue criteria

Identify patterns & find insights about requirements

Learn to use 5 powerful techniques to have productive & respectful debates so you can make decisions as a group

Practice prioritizing and deciding together

We’ve all been in working environments that lack purpose, focus on the wrong issue(s), fail to address ingrained group dynamics, or become hijacked by conflict and difficult personalities. By the end of this two-week, live, online course, you’ll be able to contribute to or lead a working environment that: - Cultivates shared meaning around the content of their work.- Makes productive use of difference and conflict.- Focuses on the actual/real challenge at hand — both internally and externally.- Makes meaningful progress toward achieving their goals.- Offers a sense of belonging to all team members.&nbsp;The Facilitation Leadership Lab is a live, online, cohort-based course for rising and established leaders who want to sharpen their facilitation skills in order to unlock their organization’s potential, accelerate their career path, or grow their consulting practice. You’ll practice these skills and frameworks in a simulated, lab-like environment, and receive personalized feedback, 1:1 coaching, and access to a peer-learning community. Facilitating organizational change isn't magic -- you can learn the skills that will help you turn stuck organizations into thriving ones, and accelerate your career. Enroll today!

🔮 Facilitating organizational change might seem like magic — it’s not.

You’ll learn techniques and frameworks for everything that needs to take place before the gathering: building trusted relationships between the facilitator and participants, identifying the core group challenge, determining the purpose and ideal outcome(s) of the gathering, and setting the agenda.

Session 1: Setting the agenda

You’ll learn the skills — active listening, reframing and reflecting, addressing conflict, generating movement, and closing — to hold the space necessary for a successful gathering.&nbsp;

Session 2: Holding the space

You’ll cultivate the interpersonal practices — building an awareness of one’s intersectional identity and personal conflict orientation — as well as key skills like managing challenging principals to navigate complex facilitations and difficult conversations.&nbsp;

Session 3: Building understanding across difference

This session takes us from facilitating a gathering in the room to solving a problem in the world. You’ll learn skills and frameworks for diagnosing the present problem, building utopias and dystopias, and piloting strategies to help organizations think beyond their current reality and build a collective vision for the future.

Session 4: Visioning & world-building

✏️  Course syllabus

Session 1: Saturday, February 1, 12:00 - 4:00 pm ESTSession 2: Sunday, February 2, 12:00 - 4:00 pm ESTSession 3: Saturday, February 8, 12:00 - 4:00 pm ESTSession 4: Sunday, February 9, 12:00 - 4:00 pm EST

February 1 - 9 

In between the two weekends, participants will be given ‘homework’ that they can use to practice the skills they’re learning with course participants and deepen their understanding of the frameworks.

‘Homework’

📅 Course schedule

Rising or established leaders who want to level up their facilitation skills and transform their organization

Coaches and consultants who want to grow their practice with proven facilitation tools and frameworks.

Sick of bad processes preventing your organization or community from achieving its goals? This is for you!

🤔 Who is this course for? 

What you’ll get out of this course

You’ll learn proven facilitation tools and key concepts like agenda setting, active listening, relational anchoring, reframing and reflecting, conflict de-escalation, managing challenging principals, diagnosing the present adaptive challenge, and identifying ideal outcomes.

Actionable facilitation tools and frameworks.

A successful facilitation requires more than a rubric — it is an embodied craft that requires practice in dynamic contexts. You’ll practice these tools and frameworks in a simulated, lab-like environment, and receive personalized feedback, and 1:1 coaching.

Improve your craft through guided practice, peer learning, and personalized feedback. 

Facilitating change in organizations is hard, often lonely work. Leaders need peers to learn from and with. This course is your passport to a thriving peer-learning community and privileged access and discounts to future offerings from the instructors.&nbsp;

Join the Facilitation Leadership Lab peer-learning community.

You'll have the opportunity to engage 1:1 with the instructors in a free coaching session after the workshop is complete.

1:1 Coaching

Accelerate your career, unlock your organization’s potential, and build better worlds with proven facilitation skills. 

Kate Krontiris

Charley Johnson

Cohort 4

Cohort 5

MtL offers a unique learning experience for leaders in that your team is one of a cohort of teams and where YOUR CASE&nbsp;IS&nbsp;the Course in a flipped classroom. ﻿You come away with real solutions to real problems and with initiatives you can implement immediately to improve your business. Topic content, practice cases, role plays, and YOUR CASE applications are blended with real-time feedback from fellow students and instructors in ten two-hour weekly live sessions. MtL Tools and Methods make doable actions driven by seven simple truths that are otherwise anything but easy.

Your own organization is the case on which you apply MtL tools and methods. 

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

Ahead of our first live session, open and work through the Get Started and Ramp Up modules.

Course Opens

Plan on at least:<ul><li>40-minutes prep for live sessions</li><li>20-minutes post live sessions</li></ul>

Weekly Assignments

Weekly 2-hour live sessions on Thursdays

Your work in MtL culminates with a management presentation that you prepare and run through with at least one outside executive, factor input into your final submission, and that you turn in one week after the last live session for evalution and grading.

Management Presentation

Schedule

Professionally financed management teams driving to complete value creation initiatives.

Organization, unit, and function leaders driving change initiatives to grow faster/perform better.

Startup Entrepenuers looking to go from Powerpoint to Profits.

Leaders and their team with a change in mind to make to accomplish a mission, leave a legacy, or get promoted.

Owner-Operators who are ready to transition but whose organizations are not transition ready.

Manage to Lead is for:

MtL is a leadership team management and development system of integrated Tools & Methods to architect, build, govern, & change your business

Your mandate is what you target to achieve by when. Think of it as the game you are playing. In MtL you learn how to always know:<ul><li>Where things are now.</li><li>Why things must change.</li><li>How you want things to be.</li><li>How to get them there.</li></ul>

Master the Change Framework:

While business leaders agree that alignment is key to success, research shows that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/marketing-strategy/news/94-percent-leaders-believe-aligning-marketing-and-sales-gained-importance/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">&lt;33% say their top team is fully aligned</a>. MtL Tools and Methods, developed and honed by a team of successful CXO's, lead to clearity and alignment through collaboration.

Discover disconnects and align your team:

Determine which of five common operating models most closely matches that of your organization and draft a DO-SELL-GROW process map for the one that most constrains performance and growth.

Learn how to set up, assess, and mature key processes:

For financial and other KPIs you learn to measure performance relative to past, plan, and peers.

Decide what to watch, and how, to know how well you are doing:

Learn how to decide which initiatives to pursue first and <a href="https://intelliven.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Manage-to-Lead_FactSheet.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">what to do</a> to guarantee they will be completed on target, on time, and on budget!

Launch Strategic Inititiaves

Most people think you either lead or manage. The truth is you need to do both. The first thing a good leader needs to manage, is themself!

Cohort 15

Peter DiGiammarino

Professional CEO; Course Designer and Lead Instructor

Joyce Reynolds

MtL Course Designer and Co-Instructor

Cohort 14

Cohort 16

Your job as a CEO or team leader is not to order your team around, but to conduct an orchestra of highly talented individuals in a way that elicits engagement, collaboration and performance, delivering upon company goals while ideally, creating something beautiful along the way. This cannot happen when your team is not aligned, team members are stressed or burnt out, or for one reason or another, are not performing at their full capacity.&nbsp; Peak team performance is not derived from feel-good activities or mandatory team building trips. It requires optimizing the human element in your business to achieve more. It requires that you are just as passionate and engaged in what you are doing as they are, and just as passionate and engaged in them as they are. This is not an easy feat, but it is achievable. This course will provide you with the tools, systems and frameworks to help you reignite your passion and elevate your conducting skills, 10xing you and your team’s productivity. When your team is aligned and engaged, you get to spend less time in the business and more time on the business - setting the vision, accelerating growth, and making it a place your team members don’t want to leave.

Turn your team into an elite force in business.

Tuesdays & Thursdays

2 Modules Per Week; Optional 1:1 with Ali; 1 Final Integration Call

October 29 ~ November 7

Course schedule

You are a new CEO or startup founder that wants to level-up your team's and your own performance.

You’re an ambitious team leader within a larger organization that knows your team is more capable than they are letting on.

You lead a team but you yourself are feeling burnt out or disengaged, and you know there must be a more elegant way of achieving your goals.

You are an executive at a rapidly growing company with a decentralized team, and are having trouble building alignment.

You're at an organization that has prioritized product-market-fit over culture, and you're starting to see the ramifications.

Who is this course for

Hundreds of exercises, templates, and curated resources to help you clarify your Massively Transformational Purpose, and ensure it aligns with your company goals and values.

Clarity and Renewed Passion for Your Mission - Rekindle Your Love for Your Work

Proven formulas, processes and best practices for outlining crystal clear goals and determining whether you have the right people in the right seats. If you don't - and chances are you won't - guidance and resources on handling changes gracefully.

Crystal Clear Goals and an Understanding of Your Team-Purpose Fit

Science-based exercises for getting buy-in from your team - aligning your "why" with theirs. Frameworks for empowering them to execute without constant oversight, creating a culture where failures are accepted on the path to mastery, and collaborative momentum drives you forward.

A Blueprint for Helping Your Team Manage Itself, So You Can Focus On Your Area of Genius

Use the latest in neuroscience and psychology to build resilience in yourself and your teammates, freeing you all up to do your best, most impactful work, and have fun along the way.

A Burnout Proofing Guide for High Performing Teams, Helping You And Your Top Performers Become Resilient and Adaptable

Peak team performance does not happen naturally. It requires artfully optimizing the human element in business to achieve more.

Ali Winkle

Founder, Advisor & Culture Builder

Cohort 1

Cohort 2

You've been there, discussing product requirements for the third time, but still no clarity. The same stakeholders dominate the conversation while crucial voices remain silent. Despite multiple discussions, decisions keep slipping through your fingers, and your roadmap remains fuzzy. These collaboration challenges cost teams time, momentum, and ultimately, product success. Standard meetings have their place, but some product moments demand more—structured collaboration that delivers clear outcomes, drives alignment, and energizes your team. Product workshops are the missing piece in your collaboration toolkit. Not to replace all your meetings but to transform those critical moments when you need deeper thinking, broader input, and concrete decisions. Recent studies reveal that product teams spend 31 hours monthly in unproductive collaboration (Harvard Business School), while 64% of product leaders believe their teams lack effective frameworks for making complex decisions (Product Management Insights Report). How this course will help you: In this live, hands-on course, you'll learn when and how to design and facilitate high-impact product workshops. Together, we'll master practical tools that transform critical product moments, discovery sessions, planning meetings, and stakeholder alignment discussions into productive collaboration. 🔹 Session 1: Workshop Fundamentals • Identifying when a workshop is needed (and when a meeting will do)• The Workshop Anatomy: Essential components of every successful workshop• Hands-on: Transform a critical product moment into an effective workshop structure 🔹 Session 2: Workshop Design Mastery• The 4C's Framework for designing targeted workshops• Energy management and timing techniques• Hands-on: Design a workshop for your specific product challenge 🔹 Session 3: Facilitation Skills • Essential facilitation techniques for managing group dynamics• Balancing voices and handling difficult personalities• Hands-on: Practice facilitating challenging scenarios 🔹 Session 4: Putting It All Together• The Opportunity Solution Tree workshop deep-dive• Applying workshop principles to improve everyday meetings• Creating your personal facilitation style Course Format: Learn &amp; Apply Immediately 🔹 Live Learning• 4 Interactive Live Sessions - Master facilitation skills through hands-on practice in a supportive environment. Each session combines theory with immediate application so you can confidently lead your next workshop. 🔹&nbsp;Ongoing Support•&nbsp;Open Office Hours - Bring your challenges for direct coaching from me•&nbsp;Personal WhatsApp/Email Access - Reach me directly whenever you need help•&nbsp;2-Week Check-In - Share your wins and tackle any roadblocks together 🔹&nbsp;Real-World Application•&nbsp;Workshop Templates &amp; Frameworks - Ready-to-use templates that you can customise for your specific product challenges.•&nbsp;Practical Assignments - Apply techniques to your actual work between sessions and receive feedback to refine your approach.

Tired of meetings that drive no results?

Four Interactive Live Sessions - Master facilitation through hands-on practice. Each session blends theory with immediate application to build your confidence.

Mondays & Wednesdays

Practical Assignments - Apply techniques to your actual work between sessions and receive feedback to refine your approach.

Weekly projects

Product Managers tired of messy meetings, who want better outcomes and stakeholder alignment.

Designers willing to drive better alignment through workshop.

Product Ops tired of pointless meetings and looking for better ways to work.

Make the meetings valuable, as they are not cheap. We will review tactics to align everyone on a shared goal, keep them focused, and end the session with decisions and clear next steps."Never leave a meeting without deciding how to act." - P.&nbsp;Drucker

Run workshops that drive outcomes

Start the conversations early to make the workshop more efficient and get the participants excited before it starts. "Engagement begins long before the first hello." - Anonymous

Help participants start prepared and invested

Lead by example and show your excitement and passion for the workshop topic. Your energy and enthusiasm will be contagious, creating a positive collaboration environment.“Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm.” - Gordon Parks

Create engagement during workshops

Discover your superpowers to galvanise people and ideas by being positive and flexible. Learn how to handle difficult personalities and navigate unexpected challenges with confidence."Confidence comes not from always being right, but from not fearing to be wrong." - P. McIntyre

Run workshops with confidence

Earn a reputation as the people and ideas galvanizer, by turning conflicting views into alignment opportunities."Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." - H. Ford

Create cross-functional alignment

During the cohort, you have direct access to me via WhatsApp, email and weekly office hours. In this way, I make sure that I can help you quickly resolve any challenges that might arise implementing what you're learning.

Direct access to an experienced PM and facilitator

Transform key product moments into energizing collaboration where teams align, and decisions stick.

Lightning Lessons

Team Lesson: Plan A Powerful Team Offsite