Client
Center for Human Development & Family Services (CHDFS), NYC
Organizational training and team coaching for intact teams and whole organizations.
Multi-session organizational training and team coaching for intact teams or whole organizations, built around the situation you're actually in — not a fixed curriculum. Where a keynote starts something and coaching develops a leader, organizational training changes how a team operates together, over time and for good.
Usually it's a People leader, a COO, or a CEO who starts the conversation — someone responsible for how a team or a whole organization functions, not just whether it hits this quarter.
Engagements run across multiple sessions with an intact team or, at larger scope, a whole organization.
Sessions run onsite or offsite — onsite to work inside the real environment, offsite to step out of it. Either way, we build a program around what your team actually needs.
Most training works at the level of what a team knows — the model on the slide, the framework everyone can recite by Friday and no one uses by Thursday.
Charlotte and Rod work at the level underneath: what gets avoided, who defers to whom, what the group rewards without ever naming it. Change those and the way the team works changes with them — and the cost of dysfunction, turnover, stalled projects, lost momentum, drops with it.
Where it helps, the work can begin with an anonymous team assessment — Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team model — as a way of getting what people actually experience onto the table. Charlotte writes about why that's only the beginning.
A team's real operating rules are rarely the ones written down.
You see them when something goes wrong — who gets heard, who goes quiet, which problems get named and which get managed around. Most training never looks there. This work starts there.
CHDFS is a New York human-services nonprofit — roughly 200 staff working with families in crisis, where a case handled badly changes a child's life.
That work asks a lot of people. When the teams doing it stopped communicating, the strain landed on the families as much as on the staff, and leadership had run out of ways to fix it from the inside.
They brought us in for four months of experiential workshops — teaching people concrete, practicable skills for listening, asking, and staying in a hard conversation, then having them use those skills on their real situations in the room. A change of format in the final session was what finally got people who hadn't spoken in months talking freely again.
Communication had broken down between several teams. Some members avoided contact wherever possible, disrupting workflow and souring the atmosphere across the whole culture. There had been open verbal conflict followed by stretches of icy non-engagement — and management felt powerless to resolve it.
In work this sensitive, that isn't just an internal problem. Staff already absorbing difficult casework were carrying the friction home on top of it, and handovers between teams — the moments a family's case is most exposed — were happening between people barely speaking.
Instead of focusing on the organization's core aims, leaders were under constant pressure to micromanage minor personal differences that were metastasizing through the teams.
What they described wasn't a training problem. It was a room full of people who had lost the basic capacity to hear each other under pressure.
We started with the COO and CEO, before touching the teams, to understand where the pressure was concentrated and what leadership had already tried.
The material was science-grounded — how the nervous system responds in conflict, why listening collapses exactly when it's needed most — but we kept the language plain and moved fast from principle to practice. Each session introduced one or two tools:
Then we put people in pairs and small groups to use them on real situations, not hypotheticals.
People were hungry for language to describe what had been happening to them, and the skills gave it to them. By the third session, the atmosphere in the room had noticeably shifted.
Four sessions in, engagement was strong and the skills were landing — but leadership's read was that the mood was still stilted, and they worried trouble could erupt again in the harder-hit teams.
So for the fifth and final session we changed format, adapting an approach called World Café. Participants grouped themselves by trait — optimists, pessimists — and answered reflective questions in those groups. What do others get wrong about your optimism? What would you want people to know about how to communicate with you?
Members who hadn't spoken in months were talking freely again. It worked because of what came before it: by that point people already had the tools and the shared language to handle what the format surfaced. Run as session one, the same exercise would have found a room with no way to hold it.
The final format gave people a legitimate reason to speak as humans rather than as roles — but it was four months of skills work that made the room able to do it.
Beyond the room, leadership reported that the low-level friction consuming so much management time had largely dissolved. The organization's own assessment was unambiguous: what had felt like an intractable culture problem had shifted, and kept improving in the months after.
“After Charlotte and Rod's series of workshops the atmosphere and workflow significantly and noticeably improved — staff shifted from looking at colleagues through a critical lens to understanding what each person is actually trying to achieve.”
We use Patrick Lencioni's online Team Assessment, based on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team model. It looks at five connected dimensions: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and attention to collective results. Each team member completes it on their own — 42 items, about 15 minutes. Responses are anonymous and reported in aggregate, so people can say things they'd hesitate to say directly. As soon as the last person submits (or once at least 75% of the team has, if someone is unavailable), the team report is generated and sent to your main contact. We then work through the results with the team together — and that's where the real conversation starts.
Yes. Nothing about the assessment or the work itself changes. The only difference is whether we travel to you or meet online.
Always. We draw on a tested set of methods, but what we prioritize comes from your team's assessment results and the conversation that follows — typically the two or three things that most need addressing.
We will always give direct feedback. If the problem is the leader, it surfaces in the confidential assessment and again when the team processes the results together — and when it does, it has to be addressed, because a company's culture comes directly from its leader. Our aim is real change, and that isn't possible without honesty.
Once you formally engage us, a non-refundable commencement fee covers the interviews, assessment work, and design that begin well before the first session. Beyond that: cancel more than 30 days before a scheduled engagement and remaining fees are refunded; 15–30 days out, half the professional fee is payable; within 14 days, the full fee. Expenses already incurred — assessments, travel, materials — are non-refundable. We know dates move for real reasons, so where possible we'll apply cancellation fees as a credit toward one rescheduled engagement within 90 days.
Talk to us — what is your team or organization facing? Tell us the situation, who's involved, and what needs to be different, and we'll map out what the work could look like.