PACT: Productive, Aligned, Co-Creative Teams
Executive Team Coaching
Professionally certified systemic team coaching, mentoring, training, and facilitation for executive and corporate teams aimed to transform your people’s mindset, your team dynamics, your co-created success, your organization, and our world.
My Approach to Team Coaching, Mentoring, and Facilitation
I Have a Confession to Make…
I have a confession to make: Until several years ago I thought I hated working in teams.
I blamed my aversion on the fact that I was an only child, that I graduated from female-predominant college and university classes where team collaboration was not the norm, or that my professions afterwards – journalism and entrepreneurship – turned me into a lonely wolf.
What I didn’t know then was that I didn’t dislike working in teams in general – I just hated working in dysfunctional teams whose energy and toxic dynamics kept reminding me of the troublesome, soul-draining dynamics in my family of origin.
So I took the bull by the horns. I decided to become better at creating, leading, and developing high-performing teams.
I did this initially under the supervision of Dr. Peter Hawkins, from whom I learnt robust, complex, mind-expanding systemic team coaching. My learning was then enhanced by Ginger Lapid Bogda, from whom I learnt team coaching with the Enneagram, and by my embracing team coaching as a means to achieve outstanding results together while having fun and while growing as human beings THANKS TO being part of a high-performing team.
Currently I am a multiply certified EMCC-accredited executive team coach working with executive and corporate teams all over the world. While I love working with male CEOs and team leaders, my special focus is on female-led executive and corporate teams and their fascinating subtle dynamics. It is my conviction that highly productive, aligned, co-creative teams are the key to companies’ sustainable transformation. Which is why today I embrace teamwork and its transformative potential with all my heart.
Learn How We Can Work Together
Team Coaching, Mentoring, and Development Overview
Executive Team Coaching
Putting on the hat of a team coach to explore the invisible dynamics that prevent your team from being highly productive, aligned, and happy at work is a fascinating process. In it I bring forward everything I know about human personality, emotional intelligence, maturity, and individual and systemic needs at work.
Executive Team Mentoring
Compared to team coaching, in which I observe and ask more questions to nurture the space for the team to come to its own conclusions, in the team mentoring process I roll up my sleeves and I get into the trenches with the team. We can work together on the team’s North Star – purpose, mission, vision, values, and goals, on the team agreement and communication dynamics, or on the team brand. Nothing where my real-life experience can serve is out of bounds to support teams in becoming more productive, aligned, and co-creative.
Team Offsites and Retreat Facilitation
A team offsite, where we come together to get a specific piece of work done, or a team retreat, where we come together to attune to each other and to get to know each other better, are the highlights of my work. Usually carried in person in beautiful locations around the world, team offsites and retreats promise to eliminate obstacles, nurture co-creation, and energize teams for months and years to come.
How Does PACT – Productive, Aligned, Co-Creative Teams Work?
The Process
In my work with over 50 executive and corporate teams so far, I noticed a process that yields the best results for the team, its leader, and the wider organization. Take a sneak peek into the methodology I created for executive and corporate teams offered under the umbrella of PACT – PRODUCTIVE, ALIGNED, CO-CREATIVE TEAMS.
Step 0 – Let's talk
Let’s take 30 minutes to get to know each other and to talk about you, your team, and its context. Free of charge, no strings attached. During this time we should be able to identify whether I can help you and your team, and what type of team development intervention will take you faster to your desired result.
Step 1 – Let’s Involve the Team
If there is something I learnt in my years of team development it is that we can’t develop teams without their very early involvement in the process. The team members need to be part of the initial challenge mapping so they can name their specific pain points and bottlenecks and so they can already get into a solution-focused mindset. Involving the team during the diagnosis and goal-setting phase is priceless for the later success of the team development project.
Step 2 – Delivery
This is the part when we get crackin’. The team development project may involve several online sessions and one or two in-person team offsites / team retreats. In-between the live, synchronous virtual and in-person meetings the team members get specific assignments and reflection topics that nurture their growth and transformation. Equally I like to feed the team development process asynchronously via video courses, short video nudges, or async Q&A and mentoring for the team members. Companies often require an additional series of individual 1-1 coaching / mentoring sessions for the team leader and the team members, which I am more than happy to provide. The complexity, depth, and length of the team development project is decided only by your needs and availability of resources – time, energy, and budget – to nurture your team’s exceptional transformation and outcomes.
Step 3 – Evaluation and Follow-Up
During the delivery phase we engage in regular follow-up, feedback, and evaluation. We measure our progress upon attainting pre-selected milestones, and we course-correct as we go. This process is necessary because teams may rejuvenate during the project, so it is important to make room for partial evaluations and fresh small starts if new members join the team. Ultimately the team development project is wrapped up upon mutual agreement and the team leaves with a set of clear topics to observe and respect in order to continue nurturing their enduring high performance.
Get a Taste of the Topics I Regularly Address with Executive Teams
My Favorite Team Development Topics
Every team development program I design is firmly grounded in my professional experience or in the vast experience of my individual and corporate clients whom I served for the last 14 years. This combined experience creates a unique blend of diversity, depth, and versatility enabling me to serve you and your team precisely when and how you need it.
Distributed Leadership
Like it or not, our world is increasingly technology-oriented; flexible, remote work will soon become a human right. However, effective team dynamics and high productivity are not yet the norm in distributed teams and organizations. This is where I come in – to support your team to embrace, own, and deploy quality distributed, remote, and hybrid leadership skills that will help them cope and stay productive in a market undergoing profound transformation.
- Recreate your team’s North Start for a distributed work environment.
- Craft highly functional team agreements.
- Implement effective asynchronous work and team communications.
- Lead effective remote and hybrid meetings.
Team Communications
My experience as a former business journalist serves my team clients best when you need to come together and figure out how to talk to each other better and how to influence your stakeholders powerfully in a distributed work environment.
- Team branding.
- Team conflict and difficult conversations.
- Team impact communications with storytelling.
- Strategic feedback.
Emotional Intelligence for Teams
Our communication is nothing but embodied emotional intelligence. This is why my robust qualifications in emotional intelligence can serve your people now, at a time when focusing on our human intelligence is more essential than ever.
- Team coaching with the Enneagram.
- Enhance empathy in internal and external team communications.
- Practice deep listening.
- Build psychological safety, trust, and motivation at work.
Systemic Leadership
Your team, not just you, the leader, needs to see the big picture as well in order to understand the purpose of their work. This is why I am happy to develop your team’s systemic perception, to unveil hidden systemic team and organization dynamics, and to support them in making better decisions that will serve you and your entire business ecosystem in the long term.
- Understand your team’s systemic dynamics.
- Develop strategic thinking.
- Manage complex stakeholder relationships.
- Apply systemic leadership principles in your daily teamwork.
Your Success is My Success
TESTIMONIALS
I feel incredibly privileged to be able to work with some of the smartest, most heartfelt and impactful leaders and CEOs on this planet. Feel free to check my clients’ reflections on our work together.
I have been cooperating with Cristina for a long time – we met when I worked as HR Manager for IKEA Purchasing in the Czech Republic. Cristina organized a number of inspiring communication seminars and workshops. In my current position as Global Competence Leader for IKEA Purchasing I asked Cristina for individual mentoring for colleagues from my management team, focused on personal branding, developing communication skills and communicating with critical audiences. Feedback from colleagues and my own experience are very positive. These sessions are not just about communication skills, but about other interesting feedbacks and insights connected with personal development. Cristina is an inspiring woman, her feedback is very valuable to me. Cristina, thanks for the inspiration!”
Because she has been on ‘both sides of the microphone’, Cristina is a unique coach for executives needing to face the media with confidence, grace and authentic power. When we were approached by one of Central Europe’s fastest-growing banks to help their senior leaders be more confident and ‘real’ in front of the media and inventors, we contacted Cristina immediately to be on our consulting team. In her workshop using video/feedback, she taught the executives the best way to address potentially embarrassing issues, what to do if they were asked about something they knew nothing about, and how to take on ‘ambush questions’. We highly recommend her to you for your communication and leadership development needs.
In 2021, when working for Unilever, we started the journey of preparing the entire organization for working and leading in a hybrid mode. This is when I met Cristina, a highly skilled trainer on remote leadership and hybrid working. She didn’t only support my colleagues in South Central Europe but was actually a trusted partner for whole East Europe region. We had many workshops where Cristina helped us understand the new reality, equipped us with tools to navigate it farther and created a safe space for us to experiment. She is very structured, organized, friendly, patient, has huge valuable knowledge and insights to share and can tailor the content to meet any audience and every need. What I appreciated the most about Cristina is that she walks the talk, whatever she talked about during the sessions we had, you can actually see it applied; and this is an extremely important ingredient in building trust and managing change. Cristina, thank you for the journey!
Cristina helped us navigate the complexity of an instant switch into fully remote work during the first wave of the covid-19 lockdown. Through a series of workshops for the above-market Asahi team, she managed to provide a set of crisp, practical and useful rules to help the leaders manage their teams in a remote environment, fully tailored to the specifics of our company culture. She also provided us with a set of trainings on how to run remote meetings, targeted to the wider team. Her energy, empathy and down-to-earth approach resulted in a very positive feedback overall, and contributed to the transition of the business to the new ways of working. It was a very pleasant cooperation overall!
In the spring of 2020, in connection with the Covid pandemic, most communication activities switched to crisis communication mode. We were looking for a way to support the external and internal communications team, which was under a lot of pressure on a daily basis during a challenging period. Cristina and I went through a joint workshop for our communications team focused on working with emotions in times of crisis, which helped us a lot with personal and team psycho-hygiene and it strengthened our work with our personal energy in relation to our challenging environment
I recommend Cristina’s training on Personal Branding – inspiring, but mainly practical. If you want to develop in the given area and you need direction, be shown how to work properly with your brand, or how to get yourself out of your comfort zone and know how to “sell”, contact Cristina. And for those of you who underestimate the importance of your personal brand, feel free to do the same;)”
My Services Will Yield ROI for You and Your Team for Years to Come
HOW CAN YOU CALCULATE THE ROI OF YOUR INVESTMENT IN MY TEAM COACHING SERVICES?
Here are a couple of ways you can consider to measure the ROI into my team coaching and mentoring services PACT: PRODUCTIVE, ALIGNED, CO-CREATIVE TEAMS:
How much time do your people spend today in drama, confusion, frustration, conflict, and bickering? How much does that wasted time cost you and your organization?
How much time do your people spend in unnecessary meetings that could have been an email? Are you happy paying them that money?
What would happen if your best team performer left tomorrow? Do you have their know-how preserved in clear processes? How big of a loss would that be for your team and company?
How much does excessive team fluctuation cost you? How much do you pay for recruiting a new team member, how much time and money is invested in the recruitment process overall, how long is people’s mandate in your team, how long does it take them to become fully productive?
How much productivity do you lose because your people are unengaged because they lack clarity of purpose or they don’t feel safe in your team?
If companies bothered to measure all the leaky spots they have in individual and team productivity, they would go through a massive epiphany. While not easy to setup and measure with nuclear precision, you can still get a grasp of the bigger picture and see just how much more money you and your company could earn or save and how much lighter your people could work only by paying more attention to these metrics. If the ROI calculation into my team coaching services is a topic of your interest, please book a call and let’s calculate it together.
With Whom Will You Work?
Your Team Coach, Mentor, and Facilitator
I will work with you at developing your team and organization either personally or in collaboration with our VORNICA® team of professionals, should you have a complex project that requires more than one trainer or team coach. Our team development programs are works of love, carrying my own personal purpose and positive impact in the world. This is why I would be honored to get to know you and to tackle your team’s development challenges together.
If you want to learn more about me, my qualifications, and my story, please feel free to visit my My Story page.
My StoryIf you want to learn more about the complex work we do for organizations, please visit my company page VORNICA®.
VISIT VORNICA®
Make Your Next Breakthrough in Team Development
Book a simple 30-minute call with me personally to get to know each other and to assess the magnitude of your organization development challenges. The 30-minute call is a free, no-strings-attached virtual conversation. You literally have nothing to lose – and everything to gain.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the questions I receive regularly from corporate clients. Take a look, clarify your next steps, and let’s talk.
Is it just you, or do you have a team of people?
It depends on the project. I deliver most one-on-one executive coaching and mentoring programs for women CEOs personally, and I team up with reputable colleagues and professionals when we need to deploy more complex team and organization development programs.
How expensive are your services?
My services are a reflection of over 14 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies in Europe, my comprehensive professional education, and my obsessive focus on quality and effective impact. This will be reflected in the price of the service packages. However, there is always room for negotiation and alignment when you are serious about your people, executive team, and organization development.
What methods do you use in team and organization development?
I am a multiply certified and accredited coach, consultant, and trainer of the Enneagram, the most complex and effective system for people development on the market right now. I am also a certified systemic team coach (Prof. Peter Hawkins). Besides concrete communication skill development, the Enneagram and systemic intelligence will be the two major legs upon which the majority of my development offers stand.