Whistler Facilitator
Facilitated leadership retreats and multi-day offsites in Whistler and the Sea to Sky corridor.
We create sessions that are greater than the sum of their parts, guided by award-winning facilitators.
- 110,000+people facilitated globally
- Award-winningfacilitators
- Sea to Sky retreatsmulti-day, facilitated end to end
We design sessions that leave teams with shared clarity, specific commitments, and the momentum to follow through.
Trusted by teams across the public, private and non-profit sectors
Winnipeg & Manitoba
Facilitation for Winnipeg and Manitoba teams
Positive Impact facilitates strategic planning, leadership development, team retreats, and change management for organizations in Winnipeg and across Manitoba. Winnipeg holds national head offices, a large public sector, and a manufacturing base, which means a facilitator meets very different kinds of rooms in the same week.
We won't tell you we have a Portage Avenue office, because we don't. What we bring is the facilitation craft: someone neutral who owns the process so your people can own the content. You know your organization and your communities better than any visiting facilitator will, and our job is to build the room where that knowledge gets used.
What we do
The areas we're called in for most
Every engagement starts with your context. If your challenge isn't listed here, ask us anyway.
Strategic Planning
Manitoba organizations often plan on longer horizons than most, because the capital projects, the harvest cycles and the public funding cycles all run that way. We facilitate the process so a five-year plan still has names and dates attached to its first year.
Learn moreCommunication Training & COMS
Our own communication styles framework, giving teams a common language for how they each work. It travels well between a head office floor and a plant floor, which is a gap a lot of Winnipeg organizations are trying to close.
Learn moreTeam Development & Team Building
Retreats, offsites and tailored sessions that build the trust and psychological safety strong teams depend on. Worth planning around the calendar here, because a January offsite asks a great deal more of everyone's travel.
Culture & Engagement
From vision and values work to culture shifts, we help turn shared purpose into commitments people live by, including where a stated commitment has been on the wall for a while without much behind it.
Leadership Development & Executive Coaching
Hands-on coaching and development for managers and executives, aimed at building clarity and confidence in how they lead. Often people promoted out of technical or operational roles who now lead the people who do them.
Corporate Training
Participant-led training designed around your people, with tools that stay useful long after the session ends. Delivered in Winnipeg, or out to Brandon and the north when that's where your teams are.
Every engagement we run is shaped around your team. Share what you're working on and we'll build the right session around it.
Share what you're working onHow We Facilitate
Sessions that turn conversation into a plan your team can actually run with
There's no prepared script. We guide the process, your team brings the expertise, and together we build toward a plan your people helped shape and will actually use.
Here that often means a room holding head office and operations at the same table, where the two groups have different vocabularies for the same problem. Facilitator-guided, participant-led, and designed so neither group is talking past the other.
Get in Touch
Why work with us
Three ways teams here engage a facilitator
Every engagement is customizable, but most start in one of these shapes.
Quarterly or monthly
Ongoing Partnership
A facilitator who gets to know your team over time, so trust deepens and development compounds instead of starting fresh each session. Mostly virtual, anchored by one or two in-person days a year.
Best for: making development a habit rather than a one-off.
Ask about a partnershipMulti-day, immersive
Multi-Day Offsite
Extended session for strategic planning, leadership development or a culture shift. When we're flying east anyway, two days costs far less per day than one.
Best for: bigger decisions that need room to breathe.
Talk about an offsiteHalf-day to full-day
Single Workshop
A focused session built around one goal, whether that's a decision, a kickoff, or a skill like communications or building trust and psychological safety.
Best for: teams that know exactly what they need to work through.
Ask about a workshop
How we facilitate
A clear path from first call to follow-through
Each engagement follows a similar path, and includes the same care, from your first call to the work that carries on after we fly home.
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Discovery
A call to understand your context, your goals, and who genuinely needs to be in the room.
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Design
Customized session design, built around your team, not a template.
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Facilitation
An experienced facilitator in the room or online, and in the room the day before.
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Materials
Materials and tools your team can keep using afterward.
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Follow-up
A summary with commitments and clear next steps.
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Support
Optional support to help momentum carry past the session.
Why facilitation?
How a team works together shapes everything it creates.
$100 Million
is the yearly cost for big companies for staff being in pointless meetings.
65%
of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their own work.
58%
of Americans would rather go to a doctor's appointment than attend a work meeting.
75%
of decision-makers feel that collaboration needs to be improved in their companies.
Forrester Research, 2021
Outcomes
What your team walks away with
Better decisions, made together
Decisions the whole room actually gets behind, instead of quiet disagreement that surfaces later in the parking lot.
Real buy-in
Because people helped shape the outcome, they leave genuinely invested in it, not just told what was decided.
Stronger team connection
The kind of trust and psychological safety that lets high-performing teams work well together, whether they share a building or a province.
Action that sticks
Clear commitments and ownership that carry into Monday morning, not just good intentions on the day.
Fresh thinking and better ideas
Space for your team's best thinking to surface, including ideas that might never have come up otherwise.
A record everyone can point at
A written summary of what was decided, who owns it, and by when. Useful when half the group has to brief a site that wasn't in the room.
Client stories
Real teams, real outcomes
These aren't all Manitoba engagements, and we won't pretend otherwise. They're the kinds of sessions we run and the outcomes teams point to afterward.
What our clients say
It was a pleasure to work with Will and Positive Impact. I was both inspired and empowered to co-deliver a meaningful offsite. Their positive incite into leadership performance and emotional resilience gave me clear direction and tactical tools I could apply to my workplace right away. I thoroughly look forward to working with Will again.
- Haley Daniels
Olympian and Motivational Speaker
Thanks for your incredible support, kindness, professionalism, and realness.
It was my sincere pleasure and privilege to work with you on our event.
You are a unique and special human, and I’m grateful that our paths crossed on this project, and look forward to the next time.
- Shauna Grinke, MBA, CPHR
Vice President - People and CultureThe workshop was an incredibly valuable experience for our team — the facilitator created an open, engaging environment that encouraged honest discussion and collaboration. The content was thoughtfully tailored to our team’s specific goals, making the session both relevant and actionable. We’re excited to continue partnering with Positive Impact to build on the great momentum sparked in this session.
- Shannon Charbonneau
Account Director
Treetop Marketing and Promotion Inc.
I’m leaving our session with a sense of optimism that I haven’t had in a while. It was time extremely well spent! I am sure that we all feel much closer and more connected.
- Participant
MDA Geointelligence Engineering Leadership SummitThe environment that was created made me feel comfortable to participate and collaborate with my colleagues. It was very well organized. I liked the outcome of the brainstorm sessions and warmup activities.
- ParticipantThe level of engagement and pace of the training was excellent. Like the fact that this workshop was trainer-guided, but participants lead!
- ParticipantFantastic facilitating most importantly Will understood when to let us talk and when to corral us back on track. Excellent value this afternoon.
- Engagement Workshop Participant
100% Satisfaction Guarantee.
We stand behind the quality of our work with complete confidence. If you're not fully satisfied with the results, we'll make it right.
Your trust matters more to us, and our guarantee acknowledges our belief that you deserve to feel confident in every investment you make with us. That's a standard we hold ourselves to, every time.
Ready to talk about your team?
Get in TouchPlanning the days
How the days actually break down
The single most useful thing to understand before booking is that a two-day retreat is not two working days. The drive eats one end and the departure eats the other, and a plan that ignores that produces a rushed final morning.
| When | What actually happens | What it is for |
|---|---|---|
| Day one, afternoon | Arrival from about 3pm after the Sea to Sky drive, then a short opening block of ninety minutes at most | Framing the days and getting the real question on the table early, so people think about it overnight rather than on the last morning. |
| Day one, evening | Dinner, unstructured. No presentations, no working session dressed up as a social. | The part you actually came for. Most of the trust a retreat builds is built here, and packing it kills the value of the whole trip. |
| Day two, morning | The longest working block of the retreat, three to four hours with real breaks in it | The difficult conversation, while everyone is fresh and there is still a full day left to do something with what surfaces. |
| Day two, afternoon | A deliberate gap of two or three hours, then a shorter working block | The gap is working time, not a perk. Groups return to the afternoon block having resolved things on a walk that they could not resolve in the room. |
| Day three, morning | A tight final block ending by late morning, then departure | Commitments, owners and dates. Nothing new gets opened here, which is why the difficult conversation has to happen on day two. |
A local detail that matters
The two ways a Whistler retreat goes wrong
The first is over-packing. Somebody works out what a day here costs per head, feels the weight of it, and fills every hour to justify the spend. The group then spends two days in a hotel meeting room with a view they never use, which is a more expensive way to hold a meeting they could have held at the office.
The second is the opposite. The agenda is loose, the days drift pleasantly, everyone comes home having enjoyed themselves and nothing is decided. That version is harder to defend afterwards than the first, because there is no output to point at when someone asks what came of it.
What works sits between them. Fewer working hours than you think, deliberately protected, with real gaps in between and a facilitator holding the structure so the gaps stay gaps. The informal hours are doing work, and they only do it if nobody schedules over them. That is the argument for a facilitator on a retreat: not to run more sessions, but to protect the shape of the days from the instinct to fill them.
Featured Workshops
Three of the sessions that most often anchor a multi-day here.
COMS Communication Styles
COMS is our own communication styles assessment, grounded in research and facilitated by our team. It gives your people a shared way to talk about how they each work, so different styles become an advantage instead of a source of friction.
Often the day two morning block. Eight questions, one grid, and a shared vocabulary the group then uses for the rest of the retreat, which is why it works better early than late.
Eight questions, one simple grid, and a reference the whole team can point at months later.
Learn more
Strategic Planning
This is where your team gets a real say in shaping and carrying out the organization's direction, landing on initiatives that actually move forward.
The most common reason a group books two or three days. Enough room to get past the safe version of the conversation on day two, and enough time on day three to turn it into priorities with names and dates.
A strategic plan is a living, breathing document. We stay involved as it plays out over the following months and years.
Learn more
5 Dysfunctions of a Team
This session takes a good team and helps make it excellent. We draw on Patrick Lencioni's well-known framework, approached through an appreciative inquiry lens that starts with what's already working.
This one benefits more than any other from a retreat setting, because trust is built in unstructured time and a retreat is the only format that reliably provides it. The five behaviours, trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results, are all on the table.
Your people walk away with shared language for how they work together, and a plan for moving forward that they built themselves.
Learn more
Our Core Team
Great content is only made better by great facilitators
Will Chambers
Founder & Facilitator
Award-winning facilitator and Founder of Positive Impact, with sessions delivered to tens of thousands of people. Will focuses on strategy, leadership, team dynamics and communication, turning concepts into clear, committed action.
More about Will
Lindsay Davis
Coach & Strategist
Award-winning coach and entrepreneurial guide, with experience spanning rural entrepreneurs in Africa to multimillion-dollar companies. Helps leaders focus on what matters most and build the resilience to anticipate challenges and move through them.
More about LindsayMichael Lorsch
Facilitator & Learning Consultant
Brings facilitation and learning design from theatre stages to executive boardrooms, including in-house work with lululemon. Blends mindfulness, relationship systems and human-centred design to keep people at the centre of every session.
More about Michael
Jason Maraschiello
Coach & Facilitator
Certified life and corporate coach, mindfulness and meditation teacher. Uses mindfulness and effective communication to help people set manageable goals, find work-life balance and build the support to follow through.
More about Jason
For a Whistler retreat we assign one lead facilitator who is with you for the whole stay and stays with you through the follow-up, rather than handing you to a different person each time. Beyond the core team, we draw on a wider network of facilitators and subject-matter experts, matched to the goals, sector, and people of each engagement.
Looking for a specific market
Worth reading before you book
Two market pages and four guides that answer the questions most teams have before a first session.
- Closer to home Facilitation in Vancouver Read the guide
- Wider footprint Facilitation across British Columbia Read the guide
- Offsites How a facilitator benefits your next offsite Read the guide
- Getting ready How to prepare your team for a facilitated session Read the guide
- Afterwards Keeping momentum after the session ends Read the guide
- Honest advice When not to hire a facilitator, and what to do instead Read the guide
Frequently Asked Questions
Whistler retreats
How many days do we actually need?
Two nights is the shortest that works properly, and three is better if the conversation is a hard one. One night doesn't repay the travel: by the time everyone has driven up you have an evening and a morning, which is a long way to go for what amounts to a half-day session. If your budget only stretches to one night, we'd usually suggest doing it closer to home instead and spending the difference on a second session later.
Isn't a retreat just an expensive way to hold a meeting?
It is, if you pack it. The most common failure here is somebody working out the cost per head, feeling the weight of it, and filling every hour to justify the spend. The group then spends two days in a hotel meeting room with a view nobody uses. What makes a retreat worth the money is the unstructured time, and that only exists if someone protects it from the instinct to schedule over it.
What's the right balance of working time and free time?
Fewer working hours than most people expect, deliberately spaced. A typical two-night retreat has a short opening block on arrival, one long block on the middle morning, a genuine two or three hour gap, a shorter afternoon block, and a tight closing block before departure. The gap is working time in disguise: groups regularly come back from a walk having settled something they couldn't settle in the room.
When is the best time of year to book?
Shoulder season, if the content matters more than the setting. Late spring and autumn are quieter and considerably cheaper than peak winter or midsummer, and a group that isn't distracted by what it could be doing outside tends to be more present in the room. Peak season is wonderful and it competes with your agenda, which is fine if the trip is partly a reward and worth knowing if it isn't.
How long does it take to get there?
About two hours from Vancouver on the Sea to Sky, longer in winter conditions or on a Friday. Plan for people arriving mid-afternoon rather than at lunchtime, which is why the first working block should be short and late. If part of your group is flying into Vancouver first, add a buffer day or accept that they'll arrive tired.
Are your facilitators based in Whistler?
No, and almost nobody is. Very few organizations booking a Whistler retreat are based there either, which is rather the point of choosing it. Everyone involved is travelling. On a multi-day booking that travel is one trip rather than one per session, so it stays a small share of the total, and it is always quoted as a separate line item.
What do we come home with?
A written summary with the decisions made, the commitments people made out loud, and who owns what by when, usually as 30, 60 and 90 day commitments after a multi-day. The closing block on the final morning exists specifically to produce that, which is why nothing new gets opened there and why the difficult conversation is scheduled for the day before.
How far ahead should we book?
Further than for a single-day session, because the venue drives the timeline. Whistler properties book up well in advance for peak periods and for conference space at any time of year, so if you want specific dates it's worth starting six months out. Our own diary needs six to eight weeks, but the room will usually be the binding constraint rather than us.
Let's talk about your team
Tell us what you're working through and where in the province your people are, and we'll tell you honestly whether facilitation is the right tool and what the session should look like.
Get in Touch
