For Organizations

Strengthening Organizational Capacity

Building your organization’s capacity is a core responsibility of leadership. ExCo2 helps you meet this challenge by designing and facilitating workshops, training, and meetings tailored to your needs.

Examples of how we’ve supported leaders include:

Executive Team Development

  • Creating a shared narrative that aligns vision, strategy, and priorities
  • Linking organizational strategy to culture, and helping teams define and sustain the culture they want.
Sample Client Experience -- Building Capacity through Engagement

The Challenge
Michelle had been leading a 1,500-person program delivery branch for two years. The pressures were constant — responding to an evolving sector, managing demands driven by regional lobbying, and supporting the transition of a new Minister and Deputy Minister. She and her Directors General were caught in days filled with transactions, leaving little time to think strategically. Across the organization, people seemed worn down and less motivated.

The Coaching Approach
Working with an ExCo2 coach/facilitator, Michelle identified her goal: to bring her executive team into stronger alignment on vision, strategy, and priorities. She also wanted to create a shared understanding of the organizational culture they aspired to build.

The coach proposed a three-phase approach over several months:

  1. Listening and diagnosis: individual meetings with each Director General to hear their perspectives — on the situation, their team’s relationship to others, and what support they needed from Michelle.
  2. Strategic team retreat: a one-day offsite to explore the organization’s context, pressures for change, desired future state, and the priorities that would drive them there. The team concluded by defining a narrative that told the why, what, and how of their shared work.
  3. Follow-through and reinforcement: individual and collective support to help each Director General replicate the same alignment within their own teams.

Throughout the process, Michelle and her coach met periodically to reflect on what she was noticing — shifts in engagement, collaboration, and ownership — and to identify how she could reinforce emerging positive behaviours.

The Outcome
As her executives began using the shared narrative to engage their own teams, momentum built. The culture started to shift toward greater openness and shared accountability. Michelle found that her job became easier: rather than having to drive every initiative, she was surrounded by leaders who were more aligned, energized, and proactive in leading change.

Skill-Building Workshops

  • Delivering clear and concise briefings
  • Time and performance management, including difficult conversations
  • Stress management and emotional intelligence
  • Understanding government decision-making and how to influence effectively
  • Team personality dynamics (using DISC self-assessment)

Facilitation

  • Conferences: clarifying objectives and structuring agendas that achieve them
  • Meetings: framing issues, identifying common ground, and facilitating decisions

Testimonials

“Through expertly designed workshops and one-on-one coaching, Ian helped my managers deepen their leadership capabilities, enhance team dynamics, and build confidence in navigating complex organizational challenges. The sessions were not only insightful but also highly practical and grounded in real-world scenarios and tailored to our unique context here at PHAC.”

Director General,
Public Health Agency of Canada