The workshops that actually change how your team works

Most team workshops change nothing.

Energetic facilitator. Post-its. Lots of nodding. A shared document with action points that nobody opens three weeks later.

The problem is never the format. It is that the session stays on the surface. People say what is safe to say. The real issues, the ones everyone knows about and nobody names, stay exactly where they were.

I know this from the inside. Before I built Loman Leadership, I spent four years at Google in Dublin managing a portfolio of 25 businesses with a quarterly revenue of €30 million. Google invests heavily in people development. I was trained in and facilitated many of the workshops I now use with clients. And what I learned, running those sessions with some of the most talented teams I have ever worked with, is that the content matters far less than the conditions.

A workshop only works when people feel safe enough to say what they actually think.

That is the work I do. Creating those conditions deliberately, then using the right structure to help teams do something they have not been able to do on their own.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

Where it starts: the scan

Before I recommend any workshop or programme, I map what is actually going on. The Leadership Scan takes 15 minutes and gives me a clear picture of where the energy leaks are, which ego-patterns are running the show, and what the team actually needs.

Most facilitators guess at this and charge you for the guessing. I measure it first.

What I find usually falls into one of three categories: the team needs to understand each other better, the team needs to make better decisions together, or the team needs to have a conversation it has been avoiding. Each requires a different approach.

Building connection and trust

The most common thing I find is that team members do not actually know each other. Not in the way that matters. They know job titles, project histories, and who responds fastest to Slack. They do not know what drives the person sitting across from them, what they are afraid of, or what they need to do their best work.

This sounds soft. It is not. Teams that lack real connection make slower decisions, have more misalignment, and lose their best people faster.

Life Paths — 1h30 · Connection · Trust

Team members create drawings of major life events, capabilities, experiences, and interests, then share them with the group. As people share, you discover what the diverse perspectives each person brings to the work actually mean. One of the most powerful sessions for building trust quickly.

Gifts and Hooks — 1h · Trust · Psychological Safety

Team members share the gifts they bring to the team and the hooks that keep them engaged and motivated at work. Works as an icebreaker for newly-formed teams and as a general team-building activity for existing teams looking to build greater trust.

Building Connection with your Team — 2h30 · Communication · Connection

Team members get into groups of three and answer honest questions about their dreams, crossroads, and doubts. They practice listening, curiosity, and appreciation. Improves communication, openness, and trust through real dialogue.

These are not icebreakers. These are structured ways to build the kind of trust that makes everything else possible.

Psychological safety as a foundation

If I had to name the single most important thing I work on with teams, it is psychological safety. The degree to which people feel safe to speak up, disagree, and admit they do not know something.

Google's Project Aristotle research found that psychological safety was the number one factor that distinguished high-performing teams from average ones. Not talent. Not strategy. Not resources. Whether people felt safe to take interpersonal risks.

In practice, this shows up in the meetings where nobody challenges the founder's idea. In the retrospectives where everyone says things went fine. In the exit interviews where someone finally says what they have been thinking for eighteen months.

EQ and Trust — 1h · Trust · Psychological Safety

Team members indicate on a scale of 1 to 10 how much trust currently exists in the team. They evaluate their emotional intelligence and identify specific behaviours they want to exhibit more often to increase the level of trust with other team members.

Team Norms for Healthy Disagreement — 1h · Trust · Communication

Develop a list of ground rules for engaging in productive conflict. Create norms around communicating different points of view in team meetings or one-on-ones. Good for new and established teams looking to lay a foundation for productive discussions.

Mirror Mirror — 1h30 · Trust · Work Styles

Introduces psychological safety and improves working relationships by sharing visual representations of answers to four questions about themselves. Builds inclusion and the freedom to disagree.

These sessions create the conditions where the real information starts moving.

Making decisions and clarifying roles

The second most common thing I find is decision-making confusion. Who decides what. Who needs to be consulted. Who is accountable when something goes wrong.

In fast-growing companies, this gets blurry fast. Someone hired when the company had ten people is still operating the same way now that it has fifty. Roles that made sense at one stage no longer fit. And nobody has had the explicit conversation about what needs to change.

RAPID Decision-Making — 1h · Decision-Making · Project Management

Team members learn to use the RAPID decision-making model, a detailed framework with elements that can easily be adapted to different situations, team sizes, and organisations. Builds clear decision-making and accountability.

Clarifying Roles — 1h30 · Roles · Project Management

Each participant creates a visual representation of their role on the team, including what they need from others and what others need from them. Team members share and work together to resolve any gaps or overlaps.

Roles and Responsibilities (RACI) — 2h · Roles · Execution

Define team roles and responsibilities for a specific project or initiative by examining the current state and modifying roles to improve clarity and execution.

These sessions are practical, fast, and create immediate clarity. They also surface things that have been causing friction for months without anyone being able to name exactly why.

Strategy and priorities

When I work with leadership teams on strategy, I find that the problem is rarely that people disagree on the destination. It is that they have never been explicit about it together.

Team Values — 1h30 · Values · Collaboration

Define and identify team values and translate those into behaviours to further explain what it means to hold those values. A great warm-up before a team purpose or mission conversation.

Team Purpose and Mission — 2h · Strategy · Priorities

Identify team purpose and mission through guided questions and a team vote. Builds structure and clarity by agreeing on why the team exists and what it is striving to achieve.

Team Vision Session — 8h · Strategy · Leadership

Teams develop shared values, purpose, mission, and strategy in one structured day. The full day that takes a leadership team through the core: why we exist, where we are going, how we get there.

Developing Shared Priorities — 1h30 · Priorities · Strategy

Develop a list of priorities the whole team agrees upon, without the political manoeuvring that usually happens when priorities are set from the top down.

These are not off-the-shelf workshops. They are built around your actual situation, your actual priorities, and what the Leadership Scan tells me your team actually needs to work on.

Stop-Start-Continue: the session that closes everything

If I had to pick one workshop that I use in almost every programme, it is Stop-Start-Continue.

It does what it says. The team identifies what to stop doing, what to start doing, and what to keep doing. Done well, it surfaces the things people have been thinking but not saying. It creates specific experiments the team commits to. And it builds momentum at the end of a longer session when energy might otherwise dip.

It works because it is concrete. Not how are we feeling about collaboration, but what is one specific thing we should stop doing this week. That shift from abstract to specific is where real change happens.

Stop, Start, Continue — 1h30 · Strategy · Team Development

Obtain a clear understanding of specific behaviour changes that will help your team become more effective. Identify and commit to specific actions, ideally ending with three experiments to improve how things work in the team. A great option to close out a longer team event.

Wellbeing and burnout prevention

In a time when one in four Dutch professionals under 35 experiences burnout symptoms, this is no longer a soft concern. It is a business risk.

Detachment Workshop for Teams — 2h · Wellbeing · Resilience

Invites participants to think about the importance of individual detachment from work, recognises the systemic barriers to detachment at a team level, and sets best practices to encourage detachment. Prevents burnout structurally rather than reactively.

Building Better Wellbeing through Self-Compassion — 1h30 · Wellbeing · Resilience

Self-compassion enables you to be kind and understanding with yourself even when you feel inadequate. Teaches skills to manage overwhelming experiences, combat self-isolation, and reduce critical self-talk.

Fundamentals of Mindfulness — 2h · Wellbeing · Slowing Down

Learn the difference between mindfulness as a mental state and mindfulness meditation as a formal practice. Not as wellness, but as strategy. A depleted brain cannot lead.

What makes a workshop work

None of these workshops work in isolation. They work because of the conditions around them.

A session on psychological safety means nothing if the leader walks in and dominates the conversation. A strategy workshop achieves nothing if the real tensions between co-founders have never been addressed. A Stop-Start-Continue exercise produces a list, not change, if there is no accountability structure around it.

What I bring is not just the workshop. It is the ability to read what is happening in the room, name what is not being said, and create the conditions where the real work can happen.

That is the difference between a team that nods through a workshop and one that leaves doing something differently.

Who this is for

I work with founders and CEOs of scale-ups and growing companies, typically between ten and a hundred people, based in the Netherlands and across Europe.

If your team is growing faster than your culture, if decisions are getting slower instead of faster, if your best people are starting to disengage, or if you have been saying we should do something about that for more than three months, this is the conversation to have.

It starts with a free 30-minute call and a Leadership Scan. No pitch. No pressure.

Stop running. Start leading.