Create Powerful Teams: Team Coaching from PowerLabs

Are you looking to improve your team's performance?

Our team coaching helps staff and volunteer teams maximize their potential and achieve their goals. 

Our team coaching support is based on decades of research on what makes teams successful. We will help you put the conditions in place that have been shown to predict up to 80% of a team's ultimate success. Our coaches also help your team develop the skills and strategies they need to improve communication, collaboration, and problem-solving.

The end result is a team that gets stronger over time, produces excellent work and contributes to the growth and learning of team members.

Through personalized coaching and support, we will work with your team to identify areas for improvement and develop a plan to help them reach their full potential. Our experienced coaches will provide guidance and support to help your team members grow and develop the skills they need to succeed.

Whether your team is just starting out or has been working together for years, our team coaching program can help them reach their goals and drive success. 

How we work

Our engagements are custom-tailored to the needs of your organization. We've worked with senior leadership teams, project teams, and volunteer teams for engagements that have lasted from six weeks to 18 months.

We typically start an engagement with the most rigorous and widely validated team effectiveness instrument, the Team Diagnostic Survey (TDS). The online survey ensures that your team gets off to the right start and guides the rest of our work together. The TDS can be used as a stand-alone assessment for diagnosing teams or incorporated as an essential component of a team coaching process.

We may decide together to use a second survey instrument to measure psychological safety—a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up about ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. Psychological safety is about candor, about making it possible for productive disagreement and the free exchange of ideas. Without that candor, teams can’t do their best work.

Once we've completed an initial assessment to identify the root causes of team performance, we'll work together to design a program for the team and team leaders to focus on the levers that lead teams to become exceptional.

The team effectiveness program typically includes workshops, individual and team coaching, and follow-up assessments.

Cost

Each engagement is tailored to the needs of the individual organization. The minimum budget for an engagement is $20,000.

Get in touch with Randall at [email protected] to discuss the needs of your organization.

Team coaches at PowerLabs

Randall Smith is the founder of PowerLabs. He specializes in helping clients use evidence-based strategies and tactics for people-powered campaigns.

He has coached, advised, and trained individuals and teams at Alabama Arise, Dream Defenders, IfNotNow, Movimiento Cosecha, Showing Up for Racial Justice, Sunrise Movement, and many other local, state, and national organizations.

Randall is a leading expert in the social change space on team effectiveness. He is certified to support teams to increase their psychological safety through the Fearless Organization External Practitioner Certification and has the highest level of certification from 6 Team Conditions to improve overall team effectiveness.

Sophia Zaia is an Associate Consultant at PowerLabs. 

She has experience both leading and coaching self-managing volunteer teams, mid-level teams and senior leadership teams at the Sunrise Movement, on Jessica Cisneros' 2022 campaign for Congress, and in the fossil fuel divestment movement. 

She directed the Sunrise Movement's distributed voter contact program in 2020, resulting in more than six million phone calls made and more than one million postcards sent through efforts organized by a self-managing team of fifty-plus volunteers in their teens and early twenties. You can read more about it here and here.

Sophia has the highest level of certification from the 6 Team Conditions to support teams to reach their highest potential of team effectiveness.

About PowerLabs

PowerLabs supports organizations to design and run people-powered campaigns.

Organizations hire us when they know that power comes from broad mobilizing and deep organizing and need a trusted advisor who can help them use an evidence-based approach to build power and win.

We support organizations with the work that gets headlines, but more importantly, we support them to change their behind-the-scenes work to increase learning, collaboration, coordination, and ultimately, their effectiveness.

Our commitment to capacity building sets PowerLabs apart from other firms. We approach consulting engagements like an organizer—our goal is to win while developing the capacity of people and organizations to lead the work long after we are gone.