Leader Team Development
Your leadership team is capable. That is not the same as being effective together.
Most senior leaders arrive at the table having been developed as individuals — assessed, coached, trained, and promoted on the basis of what they can do alone. What they rarely develop is the capacity to work as a team: to hold a hard question together rather than resolve it too quickly, to draw on each other's thinking rather than defend their own positions, to learn in real time from the complexity they are navigating together.
Amy Edmondson calls this teaming — not a structure but a practice, not a noun but a verb. Senior leadership teams that team well do not just coordinate more efficiently. They think more clearly under pressure, surface what matters earlier, and make decisions the whole team can carry. The Leader Teaming Intensive builds that capacity — grounded in Action Learning Sets methodology and the discipline of questioning over advice-giving that Reg Revans developed and leadership teams worldwide have practiced for over fifty years.
"The goal is not a team that agrees. It is a team that thinks."
SPARC — Leader Teaming Intensive
Where this fits
Stage 2 of the Developmental Arc
How do I lead? How do we collaborate?
Stage 1 builds a shared language of strengths across the team. Stage 2 extends that foundation — developing both individual leadership and the collective practice of working on hard things together. The Leader Teaming Intensive is SPARC's Stage 2 offering under Executive Leader Development.
Theoretical Foundation
Action Learning Sets: the discipline of questioning over advice-giving.
Action Learning Sets were developed by Reg Revans — a physicist who noticed that the scientists doing the most consequential work at the Cavendish Laboratory were the ones most willing to admit what they did not know and ask genuine questions of each other. He took that observation into organizations and built a methodology around it. The premise is deceptively simple: small groups of people work on real, complex problems — not case studies, not simulations — and their primary discipline is asking questions rather than offering answers.
For a leadership team, this is harder than it sounds. Senior leaders are selected and rewarded for having answers. The ALS set structure creates the conditions in which the discipline of not-answering becomes possible — and in which the team discovers that the questions they were avoiding were the ones that mattered most.
"In action learning, the change in the system is the action. The change in the individual is the learning."
Reg Revans — Founder, Action Learning
Michael Marquardt's work on Action Learning Sets in leadership contexts extends Revans' foundation: the methodology is not a facilitation technique but a developmental one. The set does not just solve the problem on the table. It develops the people working on it — building the listening, questioning, and reflective capacity that complex institutional leadership demands.
The four elements of an Action Learning Set
01
The Problem
A real, consequential challenge brought by a member of the set — one that has no obvious solution and requires genuine collective inquiry to move forward.
02
The Set
A small group — typically five to eight people — who bring diverse perspectives and the shared commitment to question rather than fix, listen rather than advise.
03
The Questions
The primary discipline of the set. Questions that open rather than close, that surface assumptions rather than confirm them, that move the problem-holder toward their own insight rather than the set's preferred answer.
04
The Reflection
The set closes with structured reflection — not on the problem but on the process. What did the team learn about how it works together? What will it do differently next time?
L = P + Q
Revans' foundational equation: Learning equals Programmed Knowledge plus Questioning Insight. Most leadership development invests heavily in P — frameworks, models, and expertise. The Leader Teaming Intensive invests in Q — the disciplined capacity to ask the questions that programmed knowledge cannot answer alone.
Mathew Johnson, Ph.D., PCC
Co-Founder · Former Dean, Brown University
ICF Professional Certified Coach · AoEC Faculty · Interaction Institute for Social Change facilitation training · Doctoral preparation in organizational development and adult learning.
Shannon O'Neill, Ph.D., PCC
Co-Founder · Former Dean, Brown University
ICF Professional Certified Coach · AoEC Advanced Practitioners Diploma with Merit · Doctoral preparation in organizational behavior and leadership development.
The Program
Two days. Real problems. A practice your team keeps.
This is not a workshop your team attends and leaves behind. The Leader Teaming Intensive is a structured two-day experience designed so that what the team practices here continues inside your institution long after the two days end. The methodology is transferable by design.
Day 1 builds the frame — theory, structure, and the discipline of the set introduced through experience rather than instruction. Day 2 puts the team inside the hard work of real institutional complexity, practicing teaming under conditions that closely mirror the leadership challenges they actually face. Both days close with structured reflection that surfaces what the team is learning about itself, not just the problems it is working on.
Format
Two-day intensive
Team size
Up to 16 participants
Delivery
In-person or virtual
Faculty
Both founders
Day One
The Frame and the First Practice
Theory grounded through immediate experience — the set structure introduced by doing it, not describing it.
Morning
Why leader teams don't team
Edmondson's teaming framework as a diagnostic lens. The four teaming practices introduced — speaking up, collaborating, experimenting, reflecting — and the psychological safety conditions that make them possible. The execution-learning tension named explicitly: when is your team in the wrong mode?
Afternoon
First set experience
Participants enter their first Action Learning Set. A real problem brought by a team member. The discipline of questioning without advising practiced for the first time — and debriefed explicitly. What made speaking up easy or hard? Where did the group default to fixing rather than asking? What did the problem-holder discover that the group could not have told them?
Day Two
Real Complexity, Practiced Together
Mock leader team scenarios drawn from real institutional contexts — and a transferable structure your team takes home.
Morning
The hard problems
Facilitated scenarios that mirror real senior leadership decision-making: budget complexity, personnel dynamics, strategic pivots under uncertainty. Participants practice teaming inside the mode the situation requires, not the mode they are most comfortable in. Two set rotations with structured debrief between them.
Afternoon
Architecture and transfer
How does your team sustain this practice after the intensive ends? Participants design a standing Action Learning Set structure for their institution — meeting cadence, problem sourcing, facilitation rotation, and accountability. The intensive closes not with a retrospective but with a commitment.
What participants leave with
A shared teaming practice
A common language and a lived experience of what it means to work on hard problems together — not just coordinate around them.
The discipline of the set
Fluency in Action Learning Sets methodology — the structure, the roles, the questioning discipline — practiced enough to use without a facilitator present.
A transferable structure
A designed, institution-specific Action Learning Set architecture ready to deploy — so the development continues long after the two days end.
Investment
From $10,000
For teams of up to 16 participants · In-person or virtual · Both founders · Scoped to your institution
Leader & Team Development
This program is one part of a coherent developmental arc.
Leader and team development at SPARC follows a coherent arc — each stage building on the one before, each opening questions that deepen the work. The Leader Teaming Intensive is Stage 2. Engagements can begin here, and frequently evolve across the arc over time.
Institutions that have completed CliftonStrengths work with SPARC often move to the Leader Teaming Intensive as the natural next step — the team has a shared strengths language and is ready to use it under real collaborative pressure. Institutions that begin here frequently find that the teaming work surfaces individual developmental questions that open the door to Stage 3 and Stage 4.
Every engagement is scoped in partnership. SPARC spends time in discovery with each institution before proposing a path — because the arc is a frame, not a prescription. If something in this resonates, let's talk.
Some institutions begin at Stage 1 and work through the arc over several years. Others enter at Stage 2 or 3, where their team already is. Some engage with a single intensive and return when the next developmental question surfaces. The work outlasts any single program.
01
Team Discovery
Who are we, collectively?
CliftonStrengths02
Leader & Team Development
How do I lead? How do we collaborate?
Leader Teaming03
Advanced Leader Development
Who do I need to become?
Leadership Circle04
Advanced Team Development
How do we build sustainable capacity?
Internal CapacityBefore this program
CliftonStrengths Team Development
Stage 1 builds a shared language of strengths across the team — the identity foundation that makes the teaming work of Stage 2 more productive. Teams that arrive at the Leader Teaming Intensive with Strengths experience move faster and go deeper.
After this program
Leadership Circle Profile
Stage 3 turns the lens inward — individual leaders working with SPARC coaches through the Leadership Circle Profile 360. The teaming work of Stage 2 frequently surfaces the individual developmental questions that make Stage 3 compelling rather than optional.
The longer arc
Institutional Coaching Capacity
Stage 4 builds the institution's own internal development infrastructure — leaders who can develop others, Action Learning Sets that run without a facilitator, a coaching culture that outlasts SPARC's direct involvement. That is the point.
The full developmental arc — all four stages, the theoretical foundation, and the programs SPARC offers at each stage — lives on the Executive Leader Development hub page.
Explore the Full ArcWhere the Stakes Are Real
Ready to transform your leadership, your team, your organization?
The Leader Teaming Intensive is scoped in partnership with each institution. We invest time in discovery before proposing a path — because the right program for your team depends on where they are, not where a catalog says they should be.
If something in this resonates, let's talk. We work with senior leadership teams in higher education, nonprofit organizations, foundations, and mission-driven government — institutions where the stakes of getting leadership right are high and the margin for wasted development is low.
This will be a conversation, not a discovery call.
Program at a glance
Program
Leader Teaming Intensive
Format
Two-day intensive
Team size
Up to 16 participants
Delivery
In-person or virtual
Faculty
Both founders · Ph.D., PCC
Investment
From $10,000
Arc position
Stage 2 — Leader & Team Development