Transforming Teams Workshop From Accidental Culture to Intentional, Relationship-Centered Organizations

Your culture is already influencing your people.

It is teaching them what to say, what to avoid, who to trust, how much risk to take, whether to collaborate, and what behaviors truly get rewarded. The question is whether that culture is being shaped intentionally or by accident.

This highly interactive workshop is based on Ed Cohen’s new ATD Press book, Transforming Teams: Build Teams That Connect, Collaborate, and Achieve. Built from 25 years of hands-on implementation in more than 150 organizations worldwide, this session challenges leaders, HR professionals, OD practitioners, and talent development professionals to rethink one of the most common assumptions in business: that performance comes first and relationships follow.

The opposite is true.

Relationships first. Performance follows.

You will move beyond culture slogans, engagement surveys, and values posters to examine how culture is created: through the behaviors people demonstrate daily, the decisions organizations reward, the conversations teams avoid, and the systems that either reinforce trust or quietly undermine it.

Through reflection, dialogue, and practical application, you will experience selected elements of the Transforming Teams™ framework. You will explore accidental versus intentional culture, the Transforming Teams six phases of Assess, Discover, Articulate, Activate, Integrate, and Transform; and, The Relationship Chain™.

Why attend?

Because many team problems are not really communication, motivation, or performance problems. They are relationship and behavior problems that have never been named clearly enough to change.

You will leave with a sharper lens, a shared language, and practical tools you can immediately use to help teams move from vague aspiration to visible action.

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

Pricing:

About our Presenter:

Ed Cohen is a globally respected leadership strategist, executive advisor, author, speaker, and coach whose work helps people and organizations grow, connect, and thrive together. Over a career spanning almost 50 years and work across more than 75 countries, Ed has served as an internationally known executive, consultant, and thought leader, holding senior roles at Booz Allen Hamilton, Satyam Computer Services, now Tech Mahindra, and SprintRay.

Ed began his career in education, where he learned that transformation starts with people, not numbers. He later helped design one of IBM’s first global desktop training programs and founded one of the earliest firms preparing employees for the personal computing era. At Booz Allen Hamilton, he founded the Center for Performance Excellence and helped embed learning into business strategy. Under his leadership, Booz Allen rose to #1 in both the ATD BEST Awards and Training Magazine’s Top 125. As Chief Learning Officer of Satyam in India, Ed helped scale leadership capability across the enterprise, launched the Satyam School of Leadership, and led the company to the #1 ranking in the ATD BEST Awards.

Together with his wife and partner, Priscilla Nelson, Ed co-founded Nelson Cohen Global Consulting, advising organizations including Amazon, Western Union, Aon, Novo Nordisk, Yahoo, Farmers Insurance, CGI India, and others in building relationship-centered, high-performance cultures. In 2020, he became Chief People Officer at SprintRay, where he applied the Transforming Teams™ methodology during hypergrowth to strengthen engagement, reduce turnover, and support an intentional culture.

Ed is the creator of the Transforming Teams™ framework, a six-phase, behavior-based system for embedding psychological safety, peer accountability, and intentional culture into daily practice. His work has contributed to 50 ATD awards and citations worldwide, including two #1 ATD BEST rankings, more than 50 ATD Excellence in Practice recognitions, ATD’s Talent Development for Good Award, and the World HRD Congress Lifetime Achievement Award.

He is the author of Transforming Teams: Build Teams That Connect, Collaborate, and Achieve, published by ATD Press; Leadership Without Borders; and the forthcoming memoir Vulnerable: One Man’s Journey from Abuse to Abundance. He also co-authored Riding the Tiger with Priscilla Nelson and Worlds Apart: A True Story of Courage, Connection, and Change with Devi Boddu.

Outside his professional work, Ed grows and shapes bonsai, a practice that reflects much of his leadership philosophy: patient cultivation, intentional design, respect for what is already alive, and the discipline to help something become enduring, resilient, and beautiful over time.

Connect with Ed:

Earn Professional Professional Development Points

This program is worth 4.5
Professional Development points. 

Find out more about APTD/CPTD Certifications here.

ATD Capability Model

This program aligns with the following Domains and Capabilities: 

Building Personal Capability

Developing Professional Capability

Impacting Organizational Capability

Talent development professionals should be able to implement a multilevel, systematic method for gathering, analyzing, and reporting on information about the effectiveness and effort of learning programs.

To find out more about the ATD Capability Model for the Training and Development Profession, visit http://tdcapability.org.

Accessibility

ATD-OC events are accessible to all participants. If you have questions or require special accommodations or auxiliary aid related to a disability for you to participate in the event, please notify us at least three weeks in advance by message to ocoffice@atdoc.org, with subject line "ADA Accommodations," outlining your needs and request for accommodation.

We will make every effort to work with you to accommodate your need.

PHOTOGRAPHY RELEASE

As part of your registration, you will be required to indicate your acceptance or rejection of the statement below:

By registering for this event, I hereby give the Association for Talent Development, Orange County Chapter, its clients, agents, and assigns, full permission to use, publish and copyright photographic images, film images, video images, sound recordings, and any reproductions from these materials of me and/or my property or any part thereof, either in conjunction with or without using my name, and make changes or alterations therein and/or alterations thereto Worldwide in perpetuity. Some places these images and recordings may be used and posted include, but are not limited to, the Internet, emails, social media, etc.

If I do not provide permission, I understand I will be seated outside of the field of video.