As the project to launch the senior leadership team at MHSR comes to a close this week it’s a good time to reflect upon the breakthroughs and breakdowns of the 10 week program.

I had never facilitated a team development program pre launch of a business or a site before. As was the case people could only relate the tools and concepts they were learning to their personal lives.

Only time will tell to see, after the property has been in existence for awhile, whether this approach to orienting a new team to the tools and concepts of our model will have any efficacy.

By the time we take the next layer of the leadership community through our initial program they will be in the early stages of having the resort be open to the general public.

One of the breakthroughs has been that Tom (Sr. VP. of the mother ship that oversees both properties) and my co facilitation was very strong. We were able to effectively calibrate our approach through weekly debriefing following the delivery of each session. We were able to identify two people on this team who will champion the model and tools in our absence.

One of the breakdowns was the duration of time spent to generate buy into the process. In the early weeks rarely would people do the assignments. By the time we got 100 percent of the participants to actively be engaged in the process we were already three sessions in.

I believe that process will be mitigated by having the two champions, who are respected leaders on site, be the active demonstration of the practices while guiding others to reinforce the concepts that Tom and I will introduce during our weekly sessions

The one tool that has already taken root is the Gift Process. The HR director has already made it a practice to insure that each new person hired experiences the Gift process and has their gift statement delivered to them.

I will take that as a huge win as that was the original intention that Tom and I held together about a year ago: Everyone who works at both resorts will have gone through the Gift process.

As I am writing these words on this page today I am truly thankful that David was inspired about 8 years ago while attending my Vistage presentation to his CEO group in Austin Texas, to reach out to me for coaching. I am thankful that through our coaching relationship he introduced me to Tom. I am thankful for the breakdowns that occurred in the early stages of my working relationship with Tom and that the two of us partnered in the ensuring breakthroughs. I am thankful that Tom was moved by the Gift process to the extent that he had more conviction on insuring that everyone in his organization go through that process than any other CEO I had worked with over the years. I am thankful for the successs of our programs for the Pagossa group that led to the identification of a couple of champions who would continue to insure that the models and tools would be regular used on site. I am thankful that through those successes David, the CEO, wanted to insure that we replicate that process with the MHSR leadership teams. I am thankful that Tom and I, through our work together up until this point flowed masterfully together as co facilitators of this most recent program.

I almost forgot: I am especially thankful that through my relationship with Tom I invented a new transformational Hack – the 3 Ps which was designed to make the Shifting Narrative Worksheet more user friendly for Tom. That collaboration has led to a tool that I now share with all of the other clients I work with and we all agree how simple, powerful and useful this tool is.