About Us

We’re crazy about well-working teams!

We’ve been on bad teams; we’ve been on good teams.

But more importantly, we’ve done a lot of research on and been a part of GREAT teams, and we know the differences between the levels of functionality.

For teams that seem stuck in their development, we have ways of finding exactly where the pain points are and we work to get them out of your way.

We help heal bad relationships between team members

We use scientific analysis to pinpoint the areas where your team needs help and then customize solutions to get the team unstuck from their problem areas.

We specialize in creating your best teams from your existing teams.

About Margaret Ricci

Margaret’s Life Purpose is to help usher in the new business organizational model called “Teal Organizational Paradigm” in the US and around the world. This revolutionary organizational model takes us into new phases of organizational management that parallels the next evolutionary stage of human development known in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as the “Self-Actualization” level. 

She’s been a part of Amber (hierarchical) and Orange (matrix) Organizations since she was 18 and knows the good they have done in fulfilling the organization’s objectives, while at the same time, acknowledging the damage they’ve done at the human level. Margaret says we must ask ourselves this basic question now:

Can’t we have both well-working organizations 
AND high care of and highest purpose for every employee?
who we are bio

Since reading the book, Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, Margaret knew that her life calling lay here – at the intersection of business and humanity.

Teal Organizational Paradigm is a global organizational movement that can be embedded inside existing organizations. Being able to understand the concepts of Teal is one thing, but addressing the challenges inside our organizations can feel daunting without a guide to help you. Not every organization that embraces Teal will want to go “Full Teal.” Organizations should pick one of the three breakthrough tenets where they want to start their journey. Being knowledgeable about the model helps you intuit your entry into it.

And that’s exactly where Margaret’s mission exists.

A teacher at heart, there’s nothing she won’t do to help organizations understand, embrace, and make the changes needed for the next generation of business evolution.

“Everything I’ve done up until this point in my life has been in preparation for this. Understanding business. Loving people. Working with awesome teams that want to work on their maturity levels. Working inside really bad teams and feeling the frustration of not making progress. Knowing how I’m wired. Knowing how I’m NOT wired. All of it. All these things shaped me. Studying “Teaming Traits” became an obsession of mine: What made the best teams? What made the worst teams? How can we transform some of the worst teams into some of the best teams in the world and still have them consist of the same team members? These were the questions I grappled with along the way.”

Of the three tenets/breakthroughs inside Teal organizations, Margaret deeply identifies and resonates with creating well-working “Self-Managed Teams.”

But, if you absolutely MUST have the normal business stuff in a bio, you can look at these. Margaret is:

  • A Co-Founder of the TeamAcumen™ Framework, created by a Global Consortium of Business Coaches. The Framework consist of an assessment that can identify exactly where an existing team may fail or fracture in their work together, but then goes on to fix the failure points so the team can become high-functioning, getting past their vulnerability points.
  • The creator of a “Strengths-based” version of Patrick Lencioni’s iconic “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” 2-day workshop, which heavily focuses on Positive Psychology to help teams move forward.
  • The first triple-qualified Gallup coach in the 5-state area of Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Iowa: 
  • Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach
  • Gallup-Qualified Builder Profile 10 (BP10) Coach (1 of only 100 external coaches worldwide)
  • Gallup-Qualified Q12 Employee Engagement Coach

Cultural Strategies’ services specialize in training organizations in Tenets 1 (Self-Managed Teams) and 3 (Evolutionary Purpose) of Teal Organizations. But Margaret also writes about Human Wholeness (Tenet 2) on LinkedIn and Medium. 

Cultural Strategies, LLC’s Creed

Everything we do in Cultural Strategies is in service of helping our clients’ businesses turn the corner on organizational construct change. We are part of a movement – the worldwide movement of Teal – where:

Business work is done by small, self-managed teams of people – even if we have 10,000 employees;

Every employee, from the CEO to the entry-level employee, show up as themselves within their own wholeness and beauty, warts and all, yet we value each other in this extreme beauty;

We listen for the evolution of the organization – we take the organization where it wants to go.