Leadership Development & Team Building Program

The Nature Place Colorado Conference Center near Colorado Springs offers Insights Discovery Exercises

Our Leadership Development tools help to:

    • Visualize, design, and act on a specific “desired state” that you create for your organization’s future, and for the teams that you lead.
    • Learn about and practice using certain aspects of proven effective leadership techniques.
    • Help your leadership team gain a better systems approach.
    • Create more sustainability in, and for the organization.
    • Learn to inspire and empower others to be more effective and efficient with the changes they are being asked to work through.  
    • Identify and share what the barriers are that hold your organization back, and how to break through them

Team Building Exercises at The Nature Place

Our Leadership Development Experiential Activities include:

Facilitation with all of our teambuilding activities are re-framed to focus on developing the participant’s leadership capacity. We work with you to customize this for your group’s particular needs. In addition, we offer:

SAWMILL BUSINESS SCENARIO

 Team Building Program at The Nature Place in Colorado    

Successfully led organizations achieve their mission by communicating a clear goal, showing their knowledge of their resources while capitalizing on them, and have an ability to execute their plans efficiently. They develop smart systems that adapt to changes in the environment, and have a plan for sustainability. Each of these characteristics can be enhanced during this role-playing event that uses an actual sawmill. Participants “do the work” and compete to win a rewarding contract for future orders.  Time frame: 1 – 2 days

ETHICS AND VALUES

To attract and hold onto a creative staff and to have sustainable growth, an organization needs goals that go beyond salaries and benefits. Shared values are what define who we are now and what we strive to become. Your clearly expressed ethics & values motivate people to move in the same direction. This program is designed to clarify personal and organizational values, leading to better ethical decision making and mission alignment. Newly formed and merging organizations define and agree on what their shared values are.

CHAOS AND ORDER

Science has been learning more and more about the “chaos and order” that exists in the natural world. The Nature Place uses this as a tool to help your leadership team make a leap with its understanding of how they work within, and lead their human ecosystem/organization.  Participants consider the long view in order to gain valuable new “leadership perspectives” on how they can affect behavior positively in your business system in order to create clearly-defined objectives. Participants gain enlightened ideas that will formulate future action plans, and therefore help lead the organization in a much more focused way. This is a great activity to use toward the end of a multi-day “leadership perspective” program to help participants create their tangible action items to be implemented when they leave the mountain. Time frame:  3 hours (outdoors)

CHANGE AND TRANSITION

Creating organizational change is a leadership skill; it is the means of transforming a leader’s vision of the future into concrete reality. It requires the skills of guiding an organization, and its individuals through a process of adapting to the change: a process known as transition. This course teaches a well-researched model and uses practical, useful tools that will reduce resistance from others, and increase the speed of the transition toward completion.  Time frame: 4 hours (conference room session)

ASTRONOMY

The Nature Place Observatory has the one of largest telescopes in Colorado, a 17 1/2 inch diameter mirror. Our location on 6,000 acres away from city lights provides an excellent opportunity for viewing celestial objects, and for considering our place and role on Earth, and in the bigger picture. This activity provides thought leaders the ultimate long view of us in space and time, giving unique perspectives that help participants prioritize what is important in their lives, and in their work.  

This is an activity that builds camaraderie by going on a journey together, while having fun looking at the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, the great cluster in Hercules, and much more.

Astronomy works well when linked with some of our other Leadership Development activities, the Five Billion Year Walk, the Forest Walk and/or Chaos & Order. Time frame: 1-3 hours

“I have often felt that to an astronomer, man is nothing more than an insignificant dot in an infinite universe. But then I realize that the insignificant dot who is man is also the astronomer.”  -Albert Einstein

FIVE BILLION YEAR WALK

Take an interactive journey during this “walk and talk” from the past to the present, while considering the continual change in Earth’s recorded history. Along the way, leaders will gain an understanding that “we are part of something bigger” and how it relates to your particular organization. We then create tangible action items that are needed in order to achieve the “desired state of the future” for your organization. This activity blends well with all of our other team and leadership development activities during a more in-depth, and intentionally multi-day program. Time frame: 3 hours to 1 days

THE FOREST WALK

Teamwork in the business world is not unlike the interconnections in a natural system, the forest in this case. Each individual brings a set of experiences, personal styles, education, motivations, and needs to the web of interconnections within the group. By looking closely at various species in the surrounding ecosystem (a research and development laboratory that is several million years old) our facilitator illustrates specifically nature’s unparalleled use of diversity, efficiency, innovation, change management, and more.  When appropriate, tangible action items for your workplace become available to the group during this facilitated “walk and talk” activity. Time frame: 90 minutes – 3 hours