Fast-Forming Teams™
Six Weeks From Polite Strangers to a Real Team
The restructure is announced, the team is named, and now it has to work. Everyone is watching, and every month of drift has your name on it. This system forms the team on purpose in six weeks, and measures the shift so you can show it.
- Most onboarding settles individuals in. This forms the team itself.
- No "wait and see". The invisible friction comes out in week one, before it sets.
- Scored before and after on the New Team Scorecard, so the shift shows up in numbers, not impressions.
Founding rate €6,500 +VAT for the first three teams, then from €9,500 · Backed by the Week-Six Guarantee
No pressure. Just an honest conversation about the team challenge you're facing. The scorecard is 16 questions, about 4 minutes.
The Unspoken Cost of "Waiting to Click"
You know the pattern. A new team forms through hiring, a restructure, a merger, or a critical project. Everyone hopes they'll "gel." But hope isn't a strategy. And while everyone waits, the person who built the team is the one answering for it.
The Solution:
Your team is forming right now, whether anyone is forming it or not. Fast-Forming Teams™ is the repeatable, measurable system that forms it on purpose: trust and honest working relationships in weeks, not months.
Five Dimensions Decide How Fast a Team Forms
Every part of the six weeks moves one of five measurable dimensions. They're the same five the free New Team Scorecard measures, so you can see your team's starting point before we ever speak.
1 · Interpersonal Trust People ask for help, admit mistakes, and say what they think in the room.
2 · Adaptive Communication Information flows between people, not just through the leader.
3 · Role Clarity & Shared Purpose Everyone can say what the team delivers and who owns which decisions.
4 · Constructive Tension Disagreement happens openly, stays about the work, and ends in real commitment.
5 · Collective Accountability Commitments hold without chasing, and peers flag slippage to each other instead of leaving it all to the leader.
Where does your team stand today? The free New Team Scorecard measures all five in about 4 minutes (opens in new tab)→
The Measurable Shift
After the six-week programme, the shift shows up in four places:
Honesty
The polite silence goes. The real issues get put on the table.
Momentum
The circling stops. The team learns to disagree, decide and commit in the same meeting.
Insight
You stop guessing why someone is pushing back. You understand the intent behind it and know how to respond.
Capability
You get a repeatable approach to forming teams you can use across the organisation, not just for this one team.
Inside the 6-Week Framework
A structured journey: one team, one clear pathway, one measurable shift.
| Week | Focus & What Happens | What Changes |
|---|---|---|
| Week 0 | Map the Team We select and deploy the diagnostic best suited to your team's context (Everything DiSC® or Insights Discovery®) to map the team's invisible dynamics: how they communicate, build trust, handle tension, and make decisions. | Assumptions replaced with data. You see how each person prefers to work, and where styles differ, before the real work begins. |
| Week 1 | The Core Workshop We bring the team together for a core team workshop: exploring their profiles, decoding each other's styles, and building a shared language for how they work. Not theory. Practical insight they'll use the same afternoon. | The Breakthrough. The foundations of psychological safety are laid. The team shifts from judging differences to using them well. |
| Weeks 2–5 | Coaching on Live Work The Integration Phase. Through 4 × targeted coaching sessions, we apply the behavioural data to live projects, real meetings, and actual decisions. The team leader learns to read the room and keep the team moving using their shared behavioural language. | Theory becomes habit. Communication patterns shift. Conflict becomes productive. The leader gains the tools to maintain momentum without external support. |
| Week 6 | The Team Charter The Future-Proofing Workshop. We co-create a 6-Month Team Charter: a living document, built from the team's combined behavioural map, that names the likely friction points and agrees in advance how the team will handle them. | A Self-Correcting Team. The team doesn't just have a plan; they have a protocol. When new challenges arise, they have the language and the framework to handle them. |
What's included: Everything DiSC® or Insights Discovery® profiles for up to 8 people · one core team workshop · four coaching sessions on live work · the 6-Month Team Charter · the New Team Scorecard, before and in week six.
Built on the Evidence, Not Team-Building Folklore
The six weeks aren't a format invented on a whiteboard. Each stage maps to peer-reviewed findings on how teams actually form:
Structured debriefs improve performance by roughly 20 to 25% on average, across 46 samples of teams and individuals. Weeks 2 to 5 are four of them, run on your team's live work.
Tannenbaum & Cerasoli (2013), Human FactorsTeams that agreed in writing how they would work together then worked together better, and the effect was clearest at the forming stage. Week 6 turns your team's version into a charter.
Johnson et al. (2021), Academy of Management Learning & EducationTrust predicts team performance across 112 studies (de Jong et al., 2016). A second meta-analysis finds the link even stronger in virtual teams than face-to-face ones (Breuer et al., 2016). Exactly where new teams now form.
de Jong et al. (2016) & Breuer et al. (2016), Journal of Applied PsychologyAcross the classic team-building research, role clarification is the component most reliably linked to performance. In this system it's Dimension 3, built into the workshop and the charter.
Salas et al. (1999), Small Group ResearchAnd one honest boundary. Everything DiSC® and Insights Discovery® are the shared language that makes real differences in working style discussable early. The research says those deep-level differences genuinely matter to team performance, and that on average they bring more friction, not less (Bell, 2007; Triana et al., 2020). That is exactly why this system puts them on the table in week one. The profile is the conversation starter, not a crystal ball.
Sources: Tannenbaum & Cerasoli (2013), Human Factors · Johnson et al. (2021), AMLE · de Jong et al. (2016) & Breuer et al. (2016), Journal of Applied Psychology · Salas et al. (1999), Small Group Research · Bell (2007), Journal of Applied Psychology · Triana et al. (2020), Journal of Management Studies.
Live, Wherever Your Team Sits
Fast-Forming Teams is built to run fully virtual: the profiles, the core workshop, the four coaching sessions and the charter session, all live on the platform your team already uses.
- Virtual, in person, or mixed. Same system, same six weeks, same guarantee.
- Sessions land inside your team's real week. No travel days, no off-site logistics.
- In-person available anywhere in Ireland when the moment calls for a room.
It's also where the trust evidence above matters most: hybrid and remote teams are precisely the ones that form by luck unless someone forms them on purpose.
Price the Problem Before You Price the Programme
A ten-person team costs somewhere around €50,000 a month in payroll before it produces anything. Left to gel on its own, a new team typically drifts for four to six months before it reaches honest, decision-making form. That is €200,000 or more of payroll carried by a team still finding its feet, and it never appears as a line item, so nobody ever has to defend it. Forming the team on purpose costs €6,500. Against the cost of the drift, it is a rounding error.
≈ €50,000 a month in payroll for a ten-person team
4–6 months the typical drift before a new team truly works
€6,500 to end the drift in six weeks, and measure the shift
Founding rate · first three teams €6,500 +VAT per team
- Everything DiSC® or Insights Discovery® profiles for up to 8 people
- One core team workshop
- Four coaching sessions on live work
- The 6-Month Team Charter
- The New Team Scorecard, whole team, before and in week six
- A fixed, itemised proposal within two working days
Why a founding rate? The six-week format is newly productised. Every component inside it is work I've delivered for years. The first three teams get the rate in exchange for a written case study.
The Week-Six Guarantee
Your whole team takes the New Team Scorecard before we start, and again in week six. Not my opinion of progress, and not yours either: the same 16 questions, scored out of 100, answered by everyone.
Week six also includes a look-back rating: the team re-scores where it really stood at the start, once it knows what good looks like. New teams in the polite phase often rate themselves generously on day one; the look-back catches that gap rather than letting it hide the shift.
If the whole-team score hasn't risen by at least 10 points on either measure, I keep working with the team at no extra cost. If a week-twelve re-take still shows less than 10 points of movement, I return the fee.
Teams that score above 85 before we start are rare. If yours is one, we agree a bespoke target on the scoping call.
From Teams I've Helped Form
Verbatim client words from team-forming work with Everything DiSC® and CliftonStrengths®.
"The StrengthsFinder session that David ran for our global leadership team was incredibly impactful in bringing together a new team, identifying individual and team strengths to accelerate effective collaboration. We held the session as a kickoff on the first morning of our offsite and it really helped set a tone of openness…"
— Niamh Townsend, VP Global PreSales, HubSpot
"Our journey began in May 2023 when he facilitated a half-day DiSC workshop for our newly formed leadership group. The enthusiastic feedback from the participants prompted us to expand the use of DiSC throughout the company, leading to David certifying one of our HR Business Partners to deliver the program."
— Maggie Bertram, Director of Learning & Development, Immersive
"The DiSC workshop gave us a shared language to talk about our different working and communication styles. … Since the workshop, we've begun to see stronger trust and understanding across the team."
— Joanna, Sr. Manager, Tauck
The Last Team You Start From Zero
Week six doesn't just leave you with one formed team. It leaves you with the playbook: the charter, the behavioural map, and a forming process your organisation has now run once and can run again.
Every new team after this one starts further ahead. Some clients have me run the next launch. Others build the framework into an ongoing HR partnership, or certify their own people to deliver the profiles internally. Either way, forming stops being luck and becomes something your organisation knows how to do.
Is Your Team a Fit?
Built for
- Intact teams of 5–12 with a leader in seat
- Newly formed, merged, restructured or project teams in their first months
- Leadership teams that never properly formed
- Leaders and HR partners who want the shift measured, not assumed
Not built for
- Teams that need restructuring, not forming
- Groups larger than 12: that's a workshop, not team formation
- A one-off training day: team facilitation is the better fit
And one boundary, stated plainly: six weeks forms a team. Sustained performance after that belongs to the leader, with the charter in hand and the shared language embedded. If I think you don't need this programme, I'll say so on the call.
Common Questions
How long does Fast-Forming Teams take?
Six weeks, plus light setup. Live virtual or in person, your choice.What size team does it suit?
Ideal for 5–12 members plus the team leader. New teams, merged teams, project teams, or leadership teams.How much does Fast-Forming Teams cost?
The founding rate is €6,500 +VAT for the full six-week programme, for the first three teams, in exchange for a written case study. It includes behavioural profiles for up to 8 people. After the third team, the standard rate is from €9,500. The founding rate closes on 31 October 2026 or when the third team signs, whichever comes first. Every engagement gets a fixed, itemised proposal within two working days.How much time does it take from the team?
Plan for roughly two working days per person in total, spread across the six weeks: the profile questionnaire, one core workshop, four short coaching sessions inside normal working weeks, and the charter session. The sessions run on your team's live work, so much of the time is spent on the job the team already has.What happens if the scores don't move?
Every programme is covered by the Week-Six Guarantee. Your whole team takes the New Team Scorecard before we start and again in week six, including a look-back rating of where the team really stood at the start. If the whole-team score hasn't risen by at least 10 points on either measure, I keep working with the team at no extra cost. If a week-twelve re-take still shows less than 10 points of movement, I return the fee.Can we run it across more than one team?
Yes. Run it as a standalone intervention for one team, or we build the framework into a repeatable internal capability your organisation can deploy again and again.Ready to Build Your Foundation?
I run at most two teams at a time, so each one gets deep focus. The founding rate closes 31 October or at the third signing, whichever comes first. Let's find out whether your team is a fit.
Not sure yet? The free New Team Scorecard is 16 questions, about 4 minutes, and shows you exactly where your team stands.