About us
We’ve been helping teams work better together since 2001, and in the Emirates since 2013. We started in the training room, moved through play, and arrived at alignment.
How we got here
We started in the training room, with courses on communication and leadership. Then came experiential training, and with it play, which took up more and more space: treasure hunts, three hundred people making pasta by hand in the same hall, orchestras, cardboard boats that genuinely had to float. The angle stayed a training one throughout: you enjoy yourself in order to take something home. Hundreds of events, thousands of people, groups from four to five hundred, across the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait.
Watching all those groups, we learned that enjoyment on its own isn’t enough, and technical training isn’t either. The teams that actually get somewhere are the ones with shared clarity on three things: where they’re going, who does what, and how they talk to each other when they disagree.
We wrote it down, too, in Time Flies and the Pilot Is You. For one person, being aligned means wasting less energy, because what they want and what they do stop pulling in different directions. For a team it means fewer collisions, less work done twice, less time lost agreeing again on things already decided.
That’s why today our work is called Team Alignment. The activities stay, with one extra job: they’re the test in the field. In a meeting a team can declare itself as aligned as it likes. A cardboard boat that has to hold the people who built it tells the truth in thirty seconds.
Where we want to get to
The vision
Happy, passionate organisations that grow as groups of people before they grow professionally.
Flexibility, freedom and joy are the conditions people work well in. Everything else comes after.
The mission
Bringing a smile into the world, one country at a time: by 2030 we want to be working in twelve countries.
To get there we widen the tribe, we build partnerships with our clients, with schools and with institutions, and we take the method out of the meeting rooms, into television formats and online courses. In 2022 the work here was recognised in Dubai’s Best, among the best team building organisers in Dubai.
Pillars and values
Passion: love, creativity, adventure, courage, vision.
Responsibility: proactivity, excellence, problem solving, social commitment.
Integrity: loyalty, fairness, transparency, respect, straight talking.
They’re the criteria we use to choose what to do and what to turn down. In practice: if an activity doesn’t serve your objective we tell you before the quotation, and if something goes wrong on the day of the event, we’re the ones who fix it.
Giovanni Gambardella
Founder and director. He has been training for twenty-five years, first in the room and then in the field, and he’s a Master Trainer in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. He has spoken from the stage of the TEDx World Changers Summit and many others, has been a guest on a number of television programmes, and has been interviewed on several podcasts. His own route is the same one that brought TeamWorking from Europe to the Gulf.
The work on alignment came out of a personal question: what happens when somebody stops being subjected to their own time and starts deciding it. The book came from that, published in English as Time Flies and the Pilot Is You and first in its category on Amazon.
When he isn’t on a stage talking, he’s on one with a guitar.
The team
We’re a group of people who care about this, from very different backgrounds and countries: we believe cultural diversity, handled with some awareness, is an enormous asset. Four different mother tongues between us. It’s more useful than it sounds, and it’s the reason the same format works across very different geographies.
Sergio
Trainer
He runs any of our formats and moves between them without blinking. On the musical activities, though, he’s something else: in half an hour he has thirty people playing together who have never held an instrument.
Karin
Trainer
Her ground is corporate theatre: improvisation, staging, and the moment somebody who swore they couldn’t act discovers the opposite.
Max
Trainer and video operator
He runs the events and films and photographs them at the same time. In a Movie Making, having somebody on the floor who can do both changes the day.
Javier
Account
A sports journalist born in Madrid, he lived in London for a long time and found love along the way.
Lisa
Social Media
A native Russian speaker, with a doctorate in Euro-American literatures and years of work in communications.
Emanuele
Coach
A native French speaker, a graduate in public relations, with a background in event organisation.
Giulia
Digital Manager
A master’s in marketing and three years abroad, then the decision to come home.
Leonardo
Account and trainer
A city boy by origin and a wanderer at heart. He only gets angry when his football team loses.
The trainers
On the day of the event, in the middle of your team, these are the people there. They come from training and education, from music, from art, from theatre.
Professionals from the entertainment world have worked with us too, as performers and hosts inside the bigger events, among them the Egyptian singer Abu.
Beyond them, each project brings in the trainers and coaches we choose for it, picked on the basis of what that particular group actually needs.
Who we’ve worked with
For more than twenty years we’ve worked alongside companies of every size, in the Gulf and internationally. Multinationals and twenty-person outfits, banks and television productions, sales networks and technical departments.
The project changes a great deal depending on the objective: celebrating a result reached isn’t the same thing as rebuilding trust after a reorganisation, and neither resembles a Team Coaching path a year long. What doesn’t change is that the activity gets chosen after understanding the why, rather than before.
And your team, where is it?
The Team Alignment Check is a free test of twenty-one questions across seven dimensions: it tells you where your team is already aligned and where it isn’t, and the report arrives by email. If you already have an event in mind, ask for a quick quote instead: answering fast is one of the things we do best.