I was seated in a circle with a group I had worked with many times before. They had committed to the long haul of team development, the kind of work that isn’t solved in a single workshop, but over time, layer by layer.

When I first met them, things weren’t good. You could feel it in the room. If something didn’t change, people were going to lose their jobs.

But session after session, they began to grow. They started naming the hard things. They brought unresolved conflict to the surface.