Corporate Teams was founded by Liz Hafer in 1995 after a successful career as a Sales Executive with Digital Equipment Corporation. Liz’s passion to pursue team and leadership training evolved from her experiences at Digital where she engaged in many programs that offered an experiential delivery. Liz observed that the training model of experiential delivery at that time had two major limitations:
- Team challenges were often single event programs that limited the opportunity for a number of leaders to emerge
- Team challenges were actually individual challenges with the team providing passive verbal support to team members.
Liz’s desire was to build upon this training model and to take it to the next level of team development. Read more about the Corporate Teams philosophy.
Liz wanted to create a high impact program that put teams under pressure in a fast-paced collaborative process providing the opportunity to move between diverse challenges. Teams would be required to analyze, develop and deploy effective and efficient solutions while under the pressure of competition and time. Multiple challenges would provide teams the opportunity to experience ‘Leadershifting‘ as individual team members shared in the leadership role. After all, this is what teams experience in the daily corporate environment.
To meet this challenge, Corporate Teams developed the Adventure in Team Leadership model and provides customized programming to teams across the globe. Using the rich suite of Communication Assessments highlighting both team and individual behaviors, Corporate Teams delivers programs that bring together the deep knowledge of communication behaviors and styles as identified with the use of assessment tools and combines this with an experiential delivery providing the opportunity to put learning into action. Research demonstrates that actual behavior changes can only occur with practice. Discussing communication principles and guidelines alone is not enough. Individuals and teams must be given the opportunity to put this learning into action to ‘experience’ behaviors and begin the process of adapting to improved methods of communication, collaboration, and ultimately the increased effectiveness of individual and team performance.
Liz completed her Masters in International Management at the University of Denver and uses her expertise to work with Global Teams across the world. Liz spent 12 years on the faculty at the University of Denver, Daniels College of Business and the University of Colorado, Leeds School of Business teaching Marketing with a concentration in International Marketing and Marketing Strategy.
Liz focuses her efforts on working with corporations and brings together a team of resources to deliver customized Team and Leadership programming along with Global Communications for cross-cultural teams.