Avid Learner

is your team:

• Just getting started or regrouping?

• Losing traction due to changes in direction or team composition?

• Not operating collectively as a team?

• Unclear about roles, processes, accountabilities, desired outcomes?

• Struggling with deadlines, conflicts, mistrust or communication issues?

Our services include:

• Tools for accelerating a team’s performance

• New team start-up and development

• The reorganization or expansion of an existing team

• Crisis intervention for a dysfunctional team

• Launching a new initiative, product or service

• Strategies and a process for building a culture based on collaboration, innovation, accountability, customer-focus or other values

• Leadership team retreats and working sessions

• Team Assessment (e.g., Meyers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions, Hogan, etc.) and interpretation sessions for the team

accelerating Team Performance

Accelerating Team Performance is a highly tailored, experiential and transformative team-building workshop conducted at a horse sanctuary and conference center outside of Pittsburgh. 

 We combine work with learning, so that a substantial portion of time is devoted to achieving whatever outcomes are necessary at the moment—weighing strategic choices, setting goals or reviewing performance, engaging in talent review discussions, resolving a key issue, etc.—but at certain teachable moments the facilitator will pivot to a hands-on activity involving the horses. 

Why We Use Horses

The idea is simple—horses are highly perceptive animals. They’re similar to your fellow team members and those you lead in many interesting ways. Like the employees in your organization, horses have their own social relationships, individual dispositions and a capacity for independent thinking. They also have unique strengths and limitations. This gives them an amazing ability to reflect ourselves right back to ourselves—allowing us to see and fully experience the impact of our personal and collective leadership behavior immediately. Our followers and friends can give us this kind of feedback too, but they may try to hide certain feelings or filter their responses—and horses won’t do that.

how it works

Our facilitators are experts in team dynamics, strategy, organizational development—and horses.  As they facilitate the “business discussions,” our facilitators keenly observe how the team is functioning—we can spot buried conflicts, lingering resentments, hesitance to commit to goals, unwillingness to discuss issues openly—and help the team see and confront issues hindering their performance.  That’s where the horses come in.  Each activity is designed and selected to illustrate a critical lesson the team must learn as it accomplishes its work. 

As they interact with the horses, team members practice many of the same skills they need to be successful in their roles—they gain new insights about establishing direction, gaining trust, openly discussing and resolving conflicts, leading without controlling, setting expectations, making commitments, compromising, setting goals, overcoming fears, communicating ideas and needs, giving feedback, building a cohesive team—and what they come to understand about horses is immediately applicable to their own team. 

Participants leave the workshop having completed or made considerable progress on the most essential tasks at hand, and with strengthened relationships and cohesiveness. They begin to act more synergistically to create mutually beneficial, outcome-based relationships. 

Level of interaction

Each exercise is based on interactions with the horses, using the same skills necessary for successful leadership and collaboration in the workplace.  No prior horse experience is necessary and participants can elect not to ride or work directly with a horse while still being able to fully participate in the team experience.  Our trained safety aides actively support all team learning activities.

Contact us to find out more, or to schedule a consultation with an expert on talent development, team development or organizational change.