Saana Karikumpu
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Team Development & Facilitation

Team Strategy & Strengths Workshop

When a small team lost a member without a replacement in sight, I designed and facilitated a workshop that helped us redistribute responsibilities, protect collaboration, and avoid burnout.

What this project demonstrates

  • Facilitation
  • Team Development
  • Change Management
  • Strengths-Based Collaboration
Impact

Key outcomes

  • The team navigated an extended period of understaffing without dropping quality — responsibilities were clear, and no one carried the load alone.
  • Communication improved noticeably: the team agreement gave people a shared reference for how to raise concerns and ask for help before things escalated.
  • The annual plan became a living tool the team returned to for prioritization and capacity conversations well beyond the workshop itself.
  • The workshop generated interest across the organization. The facilitator's guide and template were shared with other team leaders who wanted to run similar sessions themselves.

The work

03 chapters

The Challenge

Our small team lost a member with no replacement in sight, and the remaining workload still needed to be delivered at the same quality. Without stepping back to reset, responsibilities would fall to whoever spoke up first, collaboration would fray under pressure, and burnout would become a matter of time.

The team needed a way to redistribute work based on what people actually did best, agree on how we wanted to work together through the understaffed period, and see the year ahead clearly enough to plan for it.

My Approach

  1. 01Framed the workshop around strengths, values, communication, and responsibilities. By not just reallocating tasks, the conversation addressed how we work, not only what we do.
  2. 02Designed a three-hour session with individual reflection, pair work, and group dialogue to surface perspectives that rarely come up in day-to-day operations.
  3. 03Facilitated a core values exercise to help team members understand each other’s working styles and enhance collaboration.
  4. 04Co-created a team agreement covering communication, decision-making, and mutual support during the understaffed period.
  5. 05Visualized the full year's workload together to make trade-offs, deadlines, and capacity visible to everyone at once.

The Solution

  • Redistributing work by what people do best — not by who used to own what — protected quality and made the new setup feel fair rather than forced.
  • A team agreement we built together: naming how we wanted to communicate and support each other turned an unspoken agreement into something everyone could point back to.
  • Getting on the same page about the year ahead: mapping workload in Monday.com gave the team one place to check priorities, capacity, and trade-offs.
  • Facilitation over delivery: designing the session around Me-We-Us style participation made sure every voice shaped the outcome — critical when the plan depends on everyone's commitment.
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