Who We Are
We’re crazy about well-working teams! We’ve been on bad teams; we’ve been on good teams. But more importantly, we’ve been on GREAT teams, and we know the differences between the levels of functionality.
The only way businesses succeed today is through teamwork – whether that is at macro, micro, cross-functional, or co-creational levels. Great teamwork makes the difference between an organization just getting by or helping it fly its highest.
All teams are made up of people – we’re all fallible and yet we’re all wonderfully complex individuals. Sometimes we don’t bring the best of us to work but we don’t realize it. When this happens, individuals on teams can behave badly or work cross-purposely against each other, even if they don’t mean to. This impacts your teams’ abilities to achieve your goals.
At the same time, no employee wants to be a bad team player. Most really want to give their all to their employer and teams, but because of a variety of reasons which can include upbringing, different mindsets, or team dynamics, employees may unintentionally sabotage their teams instead.
We help fix team problems, equipping them with what they need to succeed together, and to work inside and for your organization’s best interests.
Our mission is to provide the best team development for any team. We specialize in creating your best teams.
If your teams function well already, you are fortunate! We can help you fly even higher, faster, better, aiming for extraordinary greatness as you accelerate your teaming abilities.
But if your teams have problems working together or seem stuck in their development, we have ways of understanding exactly where the sticking points are and work to get them out of your way.
For teams that may be dysfunctional or can’t work well together, we triage the points that will help you progress toward a better working state and then continue to add developmental components to help accelerate the team’s outputs and get relationships back on track – sometimes for the very first time.
Using the 1965 or 1977 versions of Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development is not enough these days to understand how Teams progress from the Forming Stage to the Adjourning Stage. We’ve found newer models that have a new twist on his stages, but any one model will not be able to help in today’s team development. Team Development is iterative. It is fluid. It is predicably cyclical. It is predicably conical. We walk you through how Team Development really looks, by showing you each model and helping you understand the natures of Teams.
About Margaret Ricci
Margaret’s Life Purpose is to help usher in the new 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 mimic 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 have done in human relationships at the employee and leadership levels. 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?
Ever since first reading the book, Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, Margaret knew that her ultimate calling in life lay here – at the cross-section of educating organizations and helping them craft a way forward inspired by the next stage in human consciousness, by specifically designing organizations that CAN have “both.”
Teal is an organizational evolution movement that can be embedded inside existing Amber, Orange, and Green organizations, bit-by-bit, in their forward transformation and development. Being able to understand the concepts of Teal is one thing, but addressing the challenges and changes that will happen on the inside of our organizations as they turn from older models to Teal can feel daunting for leadership teams without a guide to help them; especially if “leadership teams” may ‘go away’ inside the transformation. Not every organization who embraces Teal will have all of the many changes needed in a number of areas to go “Full Teal.” But being knowledgeable about the model starts to help you intuit your entry into it.
And that’s exactly where Margaret excels.
Everything she does is in service of organizations turning incrementally Teal.
A Teacher at heart, there’s nothing she won’t do to help organizations understand, embrace, and make the changes needed for their 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.Knowing how I’m wired. Knowing what I’m NOT good at. Teaming on good and bad teams. 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? These were the questions I sought answers for, all along the way.”
Of the three tenets/breakthroughs inside Teal organizations, Margaret deeply identifies and resonates with creating well-working “Self-Managed Teams.” This is why the focus on the inside of Cultural Strategies is to care for and create the best-working teams; each made up of awesome people.
But, if you absolutely MUST have the normal business stuff in a bio, you can look at these. Margaret is:
A part of two Global Teams:
- 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.
- A Global Teal “Community of Practice,” educating and bringing organizations through the Teal process.
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
Tools and Methods
Teal Organizational Paradigm (Frederic Laloux)
What we see in our world today in business is not what we will see in the future: our Amber (hierarchy), Orange (matrixed), and Green (pluralistic) worlds of business are turning Teal. We understand what Teal Organizational Paradigm is all about and how the next evolution of business organizations unleashes the goodness inside ourselves as human beings and accelerates our world through our organizations. This evolution brings human-centricity to the forefront, while still growing our businesses to create worth for you and your customers through fluid and cross-functional teams, and effective and worthwhile work in this Next Gen of Business.
By no means are we saying that the need for profitability is diminished; it just becomes the byproduct of having a human-centric culture and doing meaningful work. In fact, Teal organizations are on-par with Amber, Orange, and Green organizational profitability, if not even more profitable than these types of organizations.
We can help you lose your fear of Teal Paradigm by educating you first, and then working with you inside Team Development to fit you up for your Teal journey. We feel the first Tenet of Teal (Self-Managed Teams) can benefit any team, whether you’re an Amber, Orange, or Green organization, or turning Teal. Let us help you transform your teams.
We love Teal. It is our company’s Life Purpose to help make this needed course-correction in world organizations. It is a world-wide movement to put the “human” back into our organizations.
Get ready for the next generation. Let’s talk about what you’d like to see change in your work.
Builder Profile 10 (BP10) (Gallup)
Gallup’s newest assessment, BP10 charts the talents that all people have as Business Builders. For entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, and everyone in between, nothing helps you better than leaning into your innate talents about HOW you build your organization. But how can you lean into them if you don’t know what they are or which of the 10 are your strongest ones?
TeamAcumen™ Framework (Global Builders’ Consortium)
How does your team stack up on their interactions with each other? Does it get stuck in company politics or silos? How can you get it “unstuck” so that each person understands the team’s rules of engagement and follows the path of team development?
Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni)
As the only Strengths-based version of Lencioni’s concepts inside his iconic book, our Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team assessment and learning leans heavily on Lencioni’s classic concepts, while giving Strengths-based organizations a way to continue to harness their Strengths evolution by addressing and rectifying dysfunctional behaviors which may have crept into each team from years of pre-existing problems.
Conversational Intelligence® (The CreatingWE Institute)
Learn how to navigate from a Level 1 conversation (Transactional) to a Level 3 conversation (Transformational) where breakthroughs can happen. As teams learn how to mature, your conversational exchanges should mature with them, yet so many of us live without understanding that we have an undeveloped and often harming style of conversation that rips teams apart instead of infusing them with the good that we seek.
Pretotyping and Lean Canvas (Alberto Savoia + Ash Maurya)
As an entrepreneur or intrapreneur, how do you know if what you hope to sell really has a market? Now you can know, by using a technique steeped in Lean Startup methodology, yet with a more contemporary twist by pairing up Alberto Savoia’s Pretotyping principles with Ash Maurya’s Lean Canvas. Both of these create a world where market/concept fit meets your need for a thriving business.
Emotional Intelligence (Goleman)
Learn how EI helps you build, not only your own confidence, but ventures with partners where there is win-win-win as you learn how to develop Emotional Intelligence in all you do. Not only does this help us all live in a world where we can thrive, but we can use empathy to understand others and build a better world by navigating our emotions.
CliftonStrengths (Gallup)
Gallup’s venerated assessment that helps you discover “Who am I?” and “What do I give this organization or this team to help it do our work?” CliftonStrengths has been taken by over 26M people around the world. Nothing is more powerful than a person knowing how they are uniquely wired and what they give to our world. This assessment changed our lives!
Cultural Strategies, LLC’s Manifesto
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.