"Rising Festival Leaders" Strengths-Based Team Coaching | EJ Encalarde

Your team is full of talented people. So why does it feel like you're constantly working against each other instead of with each other? Festival and live events teams face impossible timelines, high-stakes decisions, and intense pressure—all while trying to coordinate across departments that speak different languages, have different priorities, and rarely understand what the other side is dealing with.

WHO This Is For

You're leading a festival, live events, or creative industry team where everyone is excellent at their individual jobs—but collaboration feels like pulling teeth. Operations thinks Programming is unrealistic. Marketing doesn't understand Production's constraints. Everyone's working hard, but the friction is exhausting.

You've tried team-building exercises. You've had the "we need to communicate better" conversation. But nothing has actually changed the dynamic.

Your team is struggling with:

Departmental silos—each team operates in their own world with minimal understanding of others' challenges
Constant friction and miscommunication—what feels like personality conflicts are actually clashing work styles and priorities
Inefficient handoffs—projects stall at transition points because teams don't know how to work together effectively
Talent walking out the door—high performers leave because the environment is more stressful than the work itself
The same conflicts repeating—every festival cycle brings the same breakdowns between the same departments

Here's the truth: The problem isn't your people. It's that they don't understand how each person's strengths show up—and how to leverage those differences instead of fighting against them.

WHY This Workshop Changes Everything

Most team development focuses on surface-level communication skills or generic personality types. This workshop goes deeper.

Using the Gallup CliftonStrengths framework combined with holistic leadership practices designed specifically for high-stakes creative industries, your team will finally understand:

Why certain departments naturally clash—and how to turn that tension into productive collaboration
What each person actually brings to the table—beyond their job title and department
How to communicate across different working styles—so Operations and Creative can finally understand each other
Where the gaps are in your collective strengths—and how to fill them strategically

This isn't another workshop where everyone nods along and nothing changes. This is experiential, festival-specific, and designed to create immediate shifts in how your team operates.

The Transformation

Across three structured engagements spanning your entire festival season, your team will learn how to use their individual strengths to work as cross-functional collaborators—transforming silos into synergy and friction into flow.

They'll stop trying to change who they are and start leveraging exactly who they are to work better together. This is where understanding meets action, and differences become advantages.

WHAT Your Team Will Achieve

After This Engagement, Your Team Will:

✓ Understand each other's strengths at a practical level—not just theory, but how it shows up in daily work and decision-making
✓ Break down departmental silos—see why other departments operate the way they do and how to bridge the gaps
✓ Communicate more effectively across functions—speak each other's language instead of talking past each other
✓ Reduce conflict and miscommunication—recognize when friction is about different strengths, not difficult personalities
✓ Create a shared framework for collaboration—practical tools your team will actually use after the workshop ends
✓ Build psychological safety and mutual respect—understand that everyone's approach has value, even when it's different from yours

This isn't a lecture. It's a highly interactive, experiential series with activities, real festival scenarios, and immediate application. Your team will leave each session with tools they can use the very next day—and a fundamentally different understanding of how to work together that deepens across the season.

This Workshop Is Ideal For:

Festival and live events production teams navigating complex, cross-functional projects
Creative industry teams in hospitality, advertising, production companies, and entertainment
Teams of 8-15 people where collaboration matters more than individual excellence
Leaders tired of the same conflicts playing out every festival season
Organizations investing in their people and committed to creating healthier, more effective team dynamics

Why This Works: Industry Expertise Meets Proven Framework

I don't teach team dynamics from a corporate training manual. I teach it from 36 years leading teams in the festival and live events industry—as President and Chief Operating Officer of Festival Productions Inc., producing the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Essence Music Festival.

I've navigated every cross-functional challenge your team faces: the Operations vs. Programming battles, the Marketing vs. Production tensions, the Finance vs. Creative conflicts. I've seen what breaks teams apart and what brings them together under impossible pressure.

As a Gallup-certified strengths coach and faculty member at Tulane University's Freeman School of Business, I combine proven frameworks with real-world festival industry application. This workshop is built specifically for teams that operate in high-stakes, fast-paced, creative environments where collaboration isn't optional—it's survival.

Why Three Parts — Not One

Most organizations invest in a single team-building day and wonder why nothing has changed by the next festival season. The answer isn't effort. It's neuroscience.

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: Without reinforcement, people forget roughly 70% of what they learn within 24 hours — and up to 90% within a week. A single workshop, no matter how well-designed, is fighting human biology before the load-out is even finished.

Spaced learning produces 200% better long-term retention than single-session training — a finding confirmed across more than 800 experiments. When learning is distributed over time, the brain doesn't just remember. It integrates.

Multi-session learning produces 5x better retention compared to the same content delivered in a single massed session — Memory & Cognition, 2022.

This is why the Rising Festival Leaders series is structured across three engagements spanning your entire festival season — not because it's more convenient, but because that's how lasting behavioral change actually works. The 90-day check-in and post-festival wrap aren't optional add-ons. They are the mechanism that makes the learning stick.

The Full Engagement

This is a complete 3-part team development series that spans your festival season — from foundation through celebration. Every part builds on the last. Nothing is one-and-done.

Full Series Investment: $7,500

Travel & Accommodations Billed Separately at Cost

Ideal Team Size: 8–15 participants (can accommodate up to 20) · In-person or virtual

The $7,500 investment breaks down to $500–$937 per person — for a complete engagement spanning your entire festival season.

Part 1 — Foundation

Discovery, Assessment & Strengths Mapping

Discovery call to understand your team's specific dynamics
Custom engagement design tailored to your context
CliftonStrengths assessments for all participants
Team strengths report and visual mapping
3-hour facilitated foundation workshop
Participant workbooks and all materials

Part 2 — Integration

Application, Collaboration & Cross-Functional Practice

90-day check-in to assess progress and recalibrate
Cross-departmental communication tools in action
Strengths-based conflict resolution practice
Team accountability framework activation
Post-workshop implementation resources

Part 3 — Sustainability

Post-Festival Wrap Celebration & Forward Planning

30-day email support between sessions
Post-festival celebration of what your team accomplished
Real talk debrief — honest reflection on the season
Review what's shifted, what's still hard, what's next
Forward-planning framework for the next cycle

Everything Included in Your $7,500:

Discovery call to understand your team's specific dynamics and challenges
Custom series design tailored to your industry and context
CliftonStrengths assessments for all participants
Three facilitated sessions (in-person or virtual)
All workshop materials and participant workbooks
Team strengths report and visual analysis
Post-workshop implementation resources
30-day email support between sessions
90-day check-in to assess progress and recalibrate
Post-festival celebration + real talk wrap and forward-planning session

This engagement is designed for organizations ready to invest in their teams. At $500–$937 per person, it's a fraction of what turnover costs when talented people leave because the environment is unsustainable. And unlike a single workshop that fades within a week, this series is engineered — by both design and neuroscience — to change how your team operates for seasons to come.

This Isn't For Everyone

This series is designed for teams and leaders who:

Recognize collaboration is breaking down—and are ready to do something about it beyond surface-level fixes
Value their people—and understand that investing in team dynamics is investing in results
Are open to a different approach—willing to look at differences as assets, not problems to fix
Want practical application—not just theory, but tools they can use immediately
Are committed to follow-through—ready to apply what they learn across the full season, not just check a box

If your team is ready to transform how they work together, let's start the conversation.

Let's Build Your Team's Collaborative Power

Your team's potential isn't missing—it's trapped in silos and misunderstanding.

The question isn't whether your people can collaborate better.
It's when will you give them the framework to finally do it?

SCHEDULE A CLARITY SESSION →

The Discovery Call is a complimentary 30-minute conversation to understand your team's specific challenges and ensure this series is the right fit. We'll discuss your team dynamics, goals, and how the engagement can be customized for your context. No pressure, no sales pitch—just an honest conversation about whether this is right for your team.

"Rising Festival Leaders"Strengths-Based Team Coaching