Team Services
Spark The Discussion in your department to enhance collaborative communication practices, prevent destructive conflict, and help leaders engage the entire workforce.
Needs Assessments
Are things not clicking in your department but you can’t figure out why? Has trust decreased, absenteeism increased, and confrontations grown?
- If your department is experiencing unexpected changes, you could use a Needs Assessment
- This assessment uses a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies to identify, understand, organize, and articulate your needs.
- GOAL: to evaluate and document your communication needs – which is the first step to creating positive change in your department.
Dr. Schaefer has been working with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department for the past several months on a project focused on increasing the effectiveness of our interview and selection process. Dr. Schaefer has taken a collaborative approach to this project, utilizing a number of innovative methods to encourage involvement and input from managers and supervisors across the organization. Dr. Schaefer has demonstrated both his expertise in the field of organizational communication and his understanding of the unique challenges we face as an organization.
Dispute Resolution Programs
What do workers do if they have a complaint? What does it look like when disputes are discussed and negotiated?
- If you don’t have clear answers to these questions, your department needs a structured Dispute Resolution Process.
- This service includes both evaluation and design components by assessing your company’s current ability to deal with disputes and designing a customized program to meet your conflict needs.
Meeting Facilitation & Assessment
What’s the biggest complaint among today’s corporate workforce? Boring, useless, and inefficient meetings!
- Unstructured meetings waste the company’s time, money, and human capital.
- One study estimates that a weekly Monday morning meeting that is run inefficiently can cost a company as much as $9,000 per week!
- Spark assesses meeting practices and will design a more useful and efficient meeting structure that is tied to your corporate culture.
- Spark will facilitate (run) high stakes meetings.
Leadership Workshops & Curricula
What is a department or team without effective leadership? An group of individuals headed in different directions following different directives. Great companies understand the importance of extraordinary leadership!
- Spark offers customized leadership development seminars and curricula tied to your corporate culture.
- We offer a variety of pre-packaged leadership workshops including Leading From Below, Leadership Alignment, Project Driven Leadership, Leaders as Storytellers, Servant Leadership, and Transformational Leadership.
Mediation & Conflict Management
What’s the most frequent way companies deal with conflict? Ignore it until it explodes or tell people to “figure it out on their own.” Both of these strategies are a recipe for disaster!
- Spark mediates workplace disputes involving employees at any level in the corporate hierarchy.
- Spark offers mediation workshops to improve listening skills, teach strategies to deliver useful feedback, and highlights tactics to deal with difficult people.
- Conflict BootCamps are intense, full immersion training sessions that changes a conflict’s paradigm from destructive to productive.
Strategic Work Sessions
Teams need trust. Without trust, a team doesn’t operate effectively or efficiently. But how do you evaluate whether your team has trust, and if it doesn’t, what do you do about it? Spark uses behavioral data and real world problems that your team is facing to create customized work sessions where Spark facilitates dialogue to work through your situations.
One-on-One Services
Give yourself the competitive edge through one-on-one coaching.Learn More
Workforce Assessment Services
Manage across the hire-to-retire lifecycle with scientifically validated workforce assessments that provide high-impact insights in minutes. Learn More