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 been a part of all kinds of 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

Margaret knows that her life calling lay here – at the intersection of business and humanity.

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.”

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 TeamingAcumen™ 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, LLC’s Creed

Everything we do in Cultural Strategies is in service of helping our clients’ existing teams become the very best versions of themselves. 

We work to instill great teaming skills in every employee that will benefit your whole organization. 

Transference of these skills inside each employee also leads to constructing the best future teams. This creates superb cross-functional teams that can work on everything from projects to creating software or exploring new discoveries. 

But it can also lead to true co-creative efforts involving your current staff, your existing customers, existing vendors, outside stakeholders, and even some of your competitors to bring you bleeding edge products or services to create some of the most successful ideas and innovations.