Booking.com: Team Formation & Alignment
Overview
Booking.com engaged us to support the formation of a newly assembled 30-person team.
The objective was not just connection. It was to accelerate trust, clarify communication dynamics, and establish a collaborative foundation that would support performance from day one.
Challenge
The team had been recently formed and lacked shared understanding across working styles, communication preferences, and informal dynamics.
Without early alignment, execution risk increases:
- Misinterpretation of intent
- Friction in decision-making
- Slower collaboration across roles
Early-stage team formation has direct consequences for delivery speed and engagement.
Approach
We designed a structured team formation intervention focused on three outcomes:
Trust and familiarity
Building the safety to speak plainly, early, before habits set in.
Communication styles made visible
Surfacing differences in how people work and talk, so they become an asset instead of friction.
Explicit shared agreements
Turning insight into collaboration norms the team wrote and owns.
Not a generic team-building activity, but a guided co-creation process that balanced energy, reflection, and structured dialogue, moving the team beyond surface connection toward practical alignment.
Outcome
- Stronger interpersonal trust across a team that had barely worked together.
- Awareness of diverse communication approaches, made explicit rather than left to be discovered the hard way.
- Agreed collaboration norms to guide future work, written by the team itself.
Participants rated the session 9 out of 10. More importantly, the team left with clarity, not just connection.