Team Development Workshops
Practical, proven sessions for teams who want to work better together.
Great teams don't just happen — they're built. And building them requires more than a team away day and good intentions. It requires honest conversations, shared tools, and the kind of facilitated space where people can say what they've been thinking but haven't said out loud.
Our team development workshops are designed to create exactly that space. Each session is practical, facilitated by an experienced OD practitioner, and grounded in real organisational experience rather than theory. Participants leave with tools and frameworks they can use immediately — not just a good feeling that fades by Monday morning.
All workshops are available as half-day, full-day, or extended sessions and can be tailored to your organisation's context, culture, and specific challenges. Some are designed for whole teams at any level. Others are specifically suited to leadership teams navigating more complex dynamics. We'll always advise on the right approach for your context.
Building Trust The foundation of everything.
Trust is the single most important factor in team performance — and the thing most teams have never explicitly worked on. Without it, people protect themselves rather than collaborate. They withhold rather than contribute. They play it safe rather than taking the risks that lead to exceptional results.
This workshop explores what vulnerability-based trust really means — why it matters, what gets in the way of it, and how teams can actively build it rather than hoping it develops on its own.
Participants leave with a shared language for trust, a clearer understanding of their own trust-building behaviours, and practical commitments to change.
Half or full day — suitable for whole teams and leadership teams. Works well as a foundation before other workshops.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002). Supporting resources and assessments available here
Go deeper: Paul Zak, "The Neuroscience of Trust", Harvard Business Review, January 2017.
Watch: Brené Brown, "The Power of Vulnerability", TED, 2010. Watch the talk
Conflict Resolution From conflict to collaboration.
Conflict in teams is normal and, handled well, can be genuinely productive. Unaddressed conflict is something else entirely — it erodes trust, damages performance, and creates a culture where people stop saying what they really think.
This workshop gives teams the tools to understand what's driving conflict beneath the surface, navigate it productively, and resolve it before it becomes entrenched. It creates space for honest conversation in a structured, safe environment — often unlocking things that have been sitting unspoken for months.
Participants leave with a shared language for conflict, practical frameworks for resolution, and a greater understanding of how their own conflict style affects those around them.
Half or full day — suitable for whole teams and leadership teams. Particularly valuable where unresolved tension is already affecting how the team works together, rather than waiting until it becomes entrenched.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Roger Fisher & William Ury, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In (Penguin, revised edition 2011).
Go deeper: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny et al., Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High (McGraw Hill, 3rd edition 2022).
Read: Amy Edmondson's original 1999 paper on psychological safety and team learning — foundational to understanding how teams handle conflict — available via Google Scholar
Challenging Conversations Say the thing.
Most teams have conversations they're avoiding. The feedback nobody has given. The behaviour nobody has named. The tension that sits in the room every time certain people are together. Those avoided conversations don't disappear — they compound.
This workshop gives participants a practical framework for having the conversations that matter — with colleagues, with direct reports, with their manager — delivered with confidence, care, and clarity. Crucially, participants practise the skills in the room rather than just learning about them, so they leave ready to act, not just aware that they should.
Half or full day — suitable for whole teams, leadership teams, new managers and people managers. Particularly valuable when there's a specific conversation the team has been avoiding, since participants leave having practised it, not just discussed it.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time (Berkley, 2002).
Go deeper: Sheila Heen & Douglas Stone, Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Penguin, updated edition 2010). Developed from the Harvard Negotiation Project.
Watch: Brené Brown, "The Anatomy of Trust", SuperSoul Sessions, 2015.
Managing Change Leading through uncertainty
Change affects people differently — and most organisations significantly underestimate that. When leaders don't understand how their people are experiencing change, they push for pace when people need time, communicate certainty when people need honesty, and wonder why engagement drops and performance suffers.
This workshop helps teams understand the psychology of change, their own and each other's responses to it, and how to maintain cohesion, momentum, and performance when things are uncertain. Particularly valuable during restructures, leadership changes, mergers, or any period of significant organisational shift.
Half day, full day, or two-day extended programme — suitable for whole teams and leadership teams
Fuel your thinking
Start here: William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change (Da Capo Press, 3rd edition 2009). Further resources available at wmbridges.com
Go deeper: John Kotter, Leading Change (Harvard Business Review Press, revised edition 2012). Further resources and tools at kotterinc.com
Read: McKinsey & Company, "The People Side of Change" — a series of articles synthesising decades of change management research into practical organisational guidance.
Sustain and Adapt Building resilience that works.
Sustainable high performance requires more than hard work and good intentions. It requires the ability to manage pressure, recover from setbacks, protect energy, and make deliberate choices about how you work — not just how hard you work.
This workshop gives individuals and teams practical strategies for building genuine resilience and sustaining wellbeing over the long term. It goes beyond the surface-level advice that fills most wellbeing programmes and addresses the real pressures people face in demanding organisational environments.
Half or full day — suitable for whole teams.Can be adapted for leadership teams with a specific focus on leading with resilience.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Lucy Hone, Resilient Grieving (The Experiment, 2017). Further resources and research at drlucyhone.com
Go deeper: Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing (Free Press, 2011). The foundational positive psychology text from the field's most prominent researcher.
Watch: Lucy Hone, "3 Secrets of Resilient People", TED, 2019. One of the top twenty most-watched TED talks.
Inclusive Leadership Leading everyone in the room.
Inclusion isn't a values exercise — it's a performance strategy. Organisations that create environments where every person can contribute fully don't just feel better to work in — they measurably outperform those that don't. And that starts with how leaders show up every day.
This workshop explores what it really means to lead inclusively in practice — not the theory, but the specific behaviours, decisions, and habits that create environments where every voice is heard and every person can do their best work. Grounded in real organisational experience, it avoids the preachiness that makes so much inclusion training counterproductive.
Half or full day — suitable for leaders and whole teams. Particularly valuable for leadership teams wanting a practical, grounded approach to inclusive behaviour rather than a values statement.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Jennifer Brown, How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (Berrett-Koehler, 2019).
Go deeper:Robin Ely & David Thomas, "Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case", Harvard Business Review, November 2020. Winner of the McKinsey Best Paper Award 2021.
Read: McKinsey & Company, "Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters", 2020. The most comprehensive and widely cited research on the relationship between leadership diversity and financial performance.
Safe to Speak Creating psychological safety.
Amy Edmondson's research is unambiguous: psychological safety is the single biggest predictor of team performance. But most leaders either don't fully understand what it means in practice, or don't realise the extent to which their own behaviour creates or destroys it.
This workshop answers both questions — what psychological safety really is, why it matters so much, and exactly what leaders can do to build it in their teams. It also addresses the harder question: what happens when a leader is unknowingly undermining it, and how to change that.
Half or full day — suitable for leaders, people managers, and leadership teams.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley, 2018). Supporting materials at amycedmondson.com
Go deeper: Amy Edmondson, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams", Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 1999. The original paper that introduced the concept.
Read: Google's Project Aristotle findings on team effectiveness. Psychological safety was identified as the single most important factor.
Watch: Amy Edmondson, "How to Turn a Group of Strangers into a Team", TED, 2017.
The Feedback Culture Giving & receiving feedback.
Feedback cultures don't build themselves. In most organisations, honest feedback is rare — people soften it, avoid it, or deliver it so infrequently that it carries too much weight when it finally arrives. Meanwhile the behaviours that need to change go unchanged, and the people who most need to hear something never do.
This workshop helps teams build the habits, language, and shared expectations that make honest, constructive feedback a normal part of how people work — not something that only happens in annual appraisals and causes anxiety when it does. It covers both sides: how to give feedback that lands well, and how to receive it without becoming defensive.
Half or full day — suitable for whole teams and people managers. Particularly valuable where feedback currently only happens at annual appraisals, or where teams want more of it but don't yet have the habits to make it normal.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Sheila Heen & Douglas Stone, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well (Viking, 2014). The most important and most overlooked side of the feedback conversation.
Go deeper: Kim Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity (St Martin's Press, 2017). Supporting tools, resources, and a podcast.
Read: Marcus Buckingham & Ashley Goodall, "The Feedback Fallacy", Harvard Business Review, March 2019. A rigorous challenge to conventional feedback wisdom worth reading precisely because it challenges the orthodoxy.
Understanding Your Working Styles (Everything DiSC®)Know yourself. Understand each other.
Most team friction doesn't come from bad intentions — it comes from people with genuinely different approaches to work who have never been given the language to talk about it. Different communication preferences, different responses to pressure, different ideas about what 'getting on with it' actually looks like. Nobody is wrong. Everyone is frustrated.
This workshop uses Everything DiSC® to give teams a shared framework for those differences. Participants explore their own style, understand how others experience them, and develop practical strategies for working more effectively across the full range of people on their team. Every participant completes the DiSC assessment before the session and leaves with a personalised profile — as useful on the day as it is six months later. This session works equally well for whole teams and for groups of leaders or managers investing in their interpersonal range.
Half or full day — suitable for whole teams at any level, leadership teams, and groups of managers.
Pre-work: Everything DiSC® assessment
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Suzanne Bates, All the Leader You Can Be(McGraw Hill, 2016). DiSC-informed exploration of leadership presence and its impact on those around you.
Go deeper: Everything DiSC® research and validation library at discprofile.com
Read: Harvard Business Review, "What Great Listeners Actually Do"Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman, July 2016. The behaviours that build the listening habits DiSC awareness makes possible.
Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams Build the team. Not just the schedule.
Hybrid working is no longer an experiment — it is the default. But most organisations are still managing hybrid teams the way they managed office teams, just with more video calls and considerably more anxiety about who is actually working. Trust is harder to build when proximity isn't guaranteed. Culture doesn't sustain itself across distance. Visibility and opportunity quietly favour those who come into the building. And it is significantly harder to notice when someone is struggling when you can't see them.
This workshop gives leaders and managers the frameworks, habits, and honest conversation they need to lead hybrid teams with intention — building a team that performs and belongs, wherever people happen to be. It addresses the real challenges rather than the logistical ones: not how to run a video call, but how to build a team when the usual conditions for doing so are no longer available.
Half or full day — suitable for leaders and managers at any level with responsibility for hybrid or remote teams.
Can be adapted for whole-team delivery where the team itself explores how it wants to work together.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Tsedal Neeley, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere(Harper Business, 2021). The most practically grounded book on distributed leadership available.
Go deeper: Lynda Gratton, "How to Do Hybrid Right" Harvard Business Review, May 2021. Evidence-based framework for designing hybrid work that actually works.
Watch: Tsedal Neeley, "How to Lead in a Hybrid Workplace" Harvard Business Review, 2022
Team Decision Making Better decisions. Less pretending you've made one.
Most leadership teams believe they make good decisions. Fewer examine how those decisions are actually made — who speaks, who stays quiet, which concerns get raised and which stay in the corridor afterwards, and whether the team has ever genuinely agreed or simply stopped disagreeing out loud. Poor decision-making processes rarely feel poor in the moment. They show up later: in the strategy nobody quite believed in, the initiative everyone could see unravelling but didn't say so.
This workshop gives teams an honest look at how they currently decide — and the practical tools to do it better. Participants explore the cognitive biases and group dynamics that most reliably derail decisions, practise techniques for surfacing minority views and stress-testing assumptions, and leave with clear team agreements about how they will decide, challenge, and commit going forward. Groupthink is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of safety in the room where decisions happen.
Half or full day — suitable for leadership teams and senior teams who make consequential decisions together. Particularly valuable for newly formed leadership groups and teams navigating significant change or uncertainty.
Fuel your thinking
Start here: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow(Penguin, 2011). The definitive account of the cognitive biases that shape decision-making — often without our awareness.
Go deeper: Cass Sunstein & Reid Hastie, Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter(Harvard Business Review Press, 2015).
Read: Roger Martin, "The Problem with Consensus" Harvard Business Review, February 2010. A useful challenge to the assumption that consensus produces better decisions.
Not sure where to start?
How to choose the right workshop.
If you're not sure which workshop is right for your team, here are a few starting points:
If trust and openness are the core issue, start with Building Trust — it creates the foundation that makes everything else more effective.
If there's a specific conflict or tension in the team, Conflict Resolution or Challenging Conversations will be most immediately useful.
If your team is going through significant change, Managing Change is designed specifically for that moment.
If you want to understand why the team works the way it does — the communication styles, the friction, the unspoken dynamics — Understanding Your Working Styles is the place to start.
If you lead a hybrid or remote team and the distance is showing, Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams addresses the specific challenges that no amount of general team development quite reaches.
If your leadership team makes important decisions together and you're not confident the best ideas are always winning, Team Decision Making is worth an honest look.
If you want to address culture and inclusion, Inclusive Leadership or Safe to Speak will create the most meaningful shift.
If you want to improve how your team develops and supports each other, The Feedback Culture is a powerful starting point.
And if you're not sure — that's what the ignition conversation is for. Tell us what's happening in your team and we'll help you work out where to start.
Many organisations find that a single workshop is a powerful starting point — and that the impact creates appetite for more. Workshops can be sequenced into a broader team development programme, delivered over several months with peer learning and reflection built in between sessions.
If you're interested in a more sustained approach, take a look at our Team Development service page for more on how we design longer-term programmes.
Ready to bring a workshop to your team?
Every workshop starts with a brief conversation to understand your context, your team, and what you want to be different by the end of the session. That conversation is free, takes thirty minutes, and means that what we design is right for you rather than just right in general.
“Kate’s expertise in facilitating an engaging agenda, guiding discussions - and keeping them on track - fostered collaboration amongst a diverse group of senior leaders. The experience was exceptional.”
Frequently asked questions
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The workshops are designed for whole teams, leadership teams, and people managers, depending on the topic. Some sessions bring everyone in the room together to do the work collectively. Others are designed specifically for the people responsible for leading and managing the team. Each workshop listing specifies who it is best suited for.
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Start with what is actually happening. If trust is low, start with Building Trust. If feedback is not landing or not happening, The Feedback Culture is the most direct intervention. If there is conflict that is not being addressed, From Conflict to Collaboration. We will always advise on the right starting point after a brief conversation about your team and what you want to be different.
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Yes, and many organisations do. Workshops can be delivered as standalone sessions or sequenced into a broader team development programme, with time between sessions for the work to embed. A sequenced approach tends to produce more durable change than a single intervention, particularly for teams navigating significant challenges.
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Yes. A pre-session 1:1 with your facilitator is built into every team development programme, not an optional extra. That conversation gives us the real picture of what’s happening in the team before we walk in the room, and gives each participant the space to share what they might not say in a group setting. For organisations wanting to go deeper, we can also offer 1:1 coaching running alongside the programme, drawing on our team of experienced coaches and facilitators. It’s always discussed as part of designing the right approach for your people.
Still have queries?
Use the contact form, or drop us a line at hello@wearefirestarter.com
