Community & Team Building

Bill Fournet

Enabling Your Teams to Perform Like Navy SEALs

Clifton Taulbert

Eight Habits of the Heart: Building Strong Communities
Eight Habits of the Heart for Educators

Note: This program is ideal as a half- or full-day workshop.

In 2011, with short notice, Navy SEAL Team Six (DEVGRU) was deployed on a mission to apprehend Osama bin Laden. This elite fighting force was the frontline force in Operation Neptune Spear–made famous through the film, Zero Dark Thirty, and the book, No Easy Day. At all levels in the operation–from the SEAL Team and the flight crews to the White House and CIA, there was effective strategic and tactical planning and execution, agility within teams and rapid decision making. This program interactively teaches how this moment in history can improve leadership capabilities, decision making and team performance.
Through a mix of hands-on exercises, film clips, and techniques, Bill Fournet will show a new way to lead your teams, better manage risks and assumptions, and apply lessons learned for your teams immediately. You will learn how to evolve your leadership capabilities to become more agile and adaptive to the ever-changing business needs in a disciplined organization. These techniques may be applied to teams, large and small.

Learner Objectives:

  • Enhanced communication skills to better provide clarity, conciseness and urgency
  • Develop your team’s performance capability and productivity
  • Rapid decision-making techniques to adapt to changing situations
  • Distinctly identify task urgencies and prioritization through new approaches
  • Enable more agility in teams without losing control
  • Ability to develop discipline in an undisciplined environment
  • Understand new team leadership models and techniques
  • Learn how to empower your team while maintain visibility
  • Quickly identify and assess risks and assumptions

In this inspiring program, based off his acclaimed book Eight Habits of the Heart: Embracing the Values that Build Strong Families and Communities, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Clifton Taulbert shares eight habits that hold the potential to change your community and your life. Strong communities are not accidental, but intentional—an ongoing process of recognizing the value of multi-micro dosages of unselfishness being lived out daily. Where such places exist, the citizens are future focused and children and the elderly are valued. To be a builder of such a place, one has to recognize the value of his or her unselfish actions, and to be a stalwart defender of working together to ensure that a good and strong community exists. According to Clifton, “Communities are the gathering of people, where dreams and ideas are explored and moved forward. Where sharing across ‘back fences’ is commonplace.” The Eight Habits of the Heart are the call to action and the materials (principles) needed to build and maintain a good and strong community.

Outcomes:

  • A genuine recognition that “Others Matter”
  • The embrace of unselfishness as the driving force to ensure a good and strong community
  • The willingness to explore personal actions that need to be STOPPED, STARTED and ACCELERATED to ensure a good and strong community
  • Understanding the VALUE of the continuous building PROCESS
  • Recognizing that building a COMMUNITY is never final, but is an on-going PROCESS

Today’s educators and students are facing insurmountable odds: funding cuts, overcrowded classrooms, increased bullying, high-stake test requirements. The Educational Landscape is changing at a blistering rate _ almost as fast as knowledge itself is growing. Yet, despite these challenges, we have still have high expectations for education. Education remains foundational to America’s continued success. This workshop and conversation have been designed to bolster the foundation for that continued success—a commitment to the focus on school culture and the type of leadership needed to create and sustain that culture—a culture that emerges from the on-going process of building community within our schools. Through personal narratives and an engaging presentation, the Eight Habits of the Heart presentation, based on Clifton’ book of the same name, provides participants the tools and conversations needed to embrace their personal roles in building a powerful school.