Learn an evidence-based framework for designing, launching and supporting healthy and powerful volunteer or staff teams

Join this intensive online training to learn the art and science of creating great teams.

A great team can accomplish more work together than a group of people working alone. Teammates can coach each other to be more effective and build the relationships that make the organization more powerful.

A poorly structured team is more likely to produce unsatisfactory results, get mired in unhealthy conflict, and lead to the team members burning out.

The good news is that creating a great team doesn’t need to be left to chance.

Decades of research have found six conditions that can be deliberately designed into a team and make it more likely that great teamwork will emerge.

Join this training to learn a framework for designing teams that perform excellent work, get stronger over time, and contribute to the team members’ growth and learning.

You’ll learn:

  • The six conditions that make it more likely for a team to achieve greatness

  • How to design a team to set it on a trajectory for success

  • How to make it more likely that the team members and the team itself learns through their work and gets stronger over time

  • How to create psychological safety—a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—to increase team performance

You’ll get hands-on experience designing and coaching teams, participate in peer coaching to help you improve your teams, and get exercises, templates, and agendas you can use in your work.

The content of this training applies to both staff and volunteer teams.

What people say about the training

Randall’s training helped me learn the principles that drive great teams, and the tools to design them. I walked away feeling way more prepared to be a better, more empathetic team leader.

- Vasudha Desikan, Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE)

Randall is an amazing facilitator and the Powerful Teams course is a great introduction for anyone who is leading a team. You come away with practical skills you can apply the next day on how to lead teams to greatness.

- Alexis Takahashi, Free Radicals

Randall's classes are a great way to gain concrete skills, tools, & frameworks to shape your organization & work. Even online, Randall is able to create an environment of trust and learning that strengthens the experience and allows people to be honest and vulnerable. By incorporating practice into the classes, participants are encouraged to really try out the tools we're learning and imagine doing it in our work.

- Ari Jahiel, IfNotNow

If every organization in the movement trained their staff and volunteers in the six team conditions, we would be 100x more powerful.

- Sophia Zaia, Sunrise Movement

Your trainers

Randall Smith is the founder of PowerLabs, a consulting firm that helps organizations design and run people-powered campaigns.

Organizations he has worked with include Courage California, Free Press, IfNotNow, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Movimiento Cosecha, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Sunrise Movement, and United for Respect.

More than 200 people have attended one of his trainings on teams including staff from Forward Together, Future Majority, GetThru, Greenpeace, Indivisible, Make the Road, Mi Familia Vota, MoveOn, MPower Change, National Domestic Workers Association, Open Progress, Pilipino Workers Center, Planned Parenthood, SEIU, SONG, and the Sierra Club.

Vera Parra is an Associate Trainer and Consultant with PowerLabs.

Previously she organized for five years with the Cosecha Movement, where she led a successful statewide campaign to expand access to drivers licenses to immigrants in New Jersey, regardless of status.

As an organizer in Cosecha she also coordinated the national field program, and experimented with how to run campaigns that build power among immigrant workers and develop leadership at scale.

Before joining Cosecha, Vera worked with Faith In New Jersey, an affiliate of Faith In Action (formerly the PICO National Network) and was a volunteer with the New Jersey Dream Act Coalition. She was introduced to organizing through the Dream Movement where she participated in campaigns to expand in-state tuition to undocumented students, stop deportations, and pressure the Obama Administration to grant administrative relief to immigrants across the country.

Training format

This is an interactive training in Zoom with breakouts and group exercises over four three-hour days. You will need to join from a computer or tablet to fully participate in the breakouts, group exercises, and chat.

Questions?

Get in touch with Randall at [email protected].