Teambuilding

Our teambuilding sessions are designed to help Japanese and Mexican counterparts enhance communication and mutual understanding. Conducted bilingually, they provide a space in which there is a high density of communication, enabling the group to make significant progress on sensitive and complex issues in a way that is efficient and impactful. Our teambuilding sessions are designed to be culturally comfortable for both Japanese and Mexicans and to achieve active participation by everyone in attendance.

Achieving Cross-Cultural Collaboration

This 1-day session uses case studies as a way to jump-start dialogue between Japanese and Mexicans about the cultural issues that impact their work. Through direct interaction and discussion, participants, gain a better understanding of their colleagues’ viewpoints. A “space” is created where cultural issues that are difficult to broach during the daily routine can be discussed in an open and carefully-facilitated environment. Participants leave this session with important insights about cultural differences, concrete strategies for improving their relationships, and an enhanced sense of camaraderie.

Cross-cultural Executive Teambuilding with Action Planning

This 1 to 2 day session is designed as an intensive offsite activity for executive teams. It begins with our unique Group Mirror activity, which surfaces the group’s key issues in a culturally comfortable way and examines their roots in cultural differences. Then, the group prioritizes these issues, and works together to develop action plans for addressing them, including “projects” to make specific improvements and “customs” that involve changing interaction patterns on an ongoing basis. At the end of the session, the group will have a concrete plan for improving how it works together. Longer sessions also include exercises that enable the group to examine both cultural differences and individual personality differences to increase mutual understanding, trust and teamwork. These sessions can be customized to address specific situations such as post-merger integration, leadership changes, or changes in company strategy.

High Performance Teambuilding

For teams that want to address both cross-cultural issues and other team challenges, this teambuilding workshop focuses on how to turn a good team into a great team with vision, commitment and trust.

This workshop can be delivered in either a one or two-day length, and includes assessment tools, exercises, and feedback. The session is also followed up with coaching to improve leadership skills, communications, enhance relationships and ultimately, to achieve the results that impact the performance of your team.

The workshop begins with a DiSC, an assessment that provides a non-judgmental language for exploring behavioral styles and provides feedback designed to help your organization’s team members:

• Value the behavior of others
• Improve communication skills by determining communication styles
• Improve customer relationships
• Reduce conflict and stress
• Enhance listening and coaching skills
• Develop effective leaders
• Create a vision, commitment and trust
• Build a high performing team that improves results year after year

In the program that follows, participants will learn to:

• Break down barriers and patterns that operate in day-to-day situations
• Deal with conflict effectively
• Create a relaxed climate of communication
• Practice listening and coaching each other
• Solve problems as a group efficiently
• Respect the contributions of other team members
• Influence others and influence the group as a whole
• Build self confidence in presenting ideas to the group
• Creatively collaborate with each other to achieve breakthrough ideas and results
• Set goals and create an action plan for the group
• Align individual objectives and design an action plan for each participant

As part of an off-site teambuilding workshop, we encourage including an outdoor teambuilding adventure designed to jump-start and compliment the session. Outdoor teambuilding activities emphasize thinking “out-of-the-box” and developing collaboration and trust through exercises in a challenging outdoor environment.

Developing a Hybrid Culture

This activity is appropriate for an executive team that wants to define its company culture and values, or for divisions, departments, or other work teams that want to create a blueprint for how they will work together. This activity is based on the idea that the most successful operations of Japanese firms consciously choose to combine the best aspects of the parent company culture with the best aspects of Mexican business approaches. The participants go through a process that helps them identify what factors they believe are most important to ensuring their company’s success, with the end result being a definition of their company’s culture that can be shared throughout the organization.

Mission Statement Development

In this session, participants engage in an interactive process to create a mission statement for their firm that reflects the values of both Mexicans and Japanese. Since many Japanese are unfamiliar with the mission statement development process, this session addresses why mission statements are important, and how they can be used to ensure that the entire company is moving in the same direction.