From Fractured to Flourishing: How One Team Rebuilt Trust Through Art

Julie McVey
Sep 2
2 min read

Three months ago, a newly formed team walked into our studio carrying more than just laptops and job titles. They brought the weight of layoffs, re-orgs, and the kind of quiet hostility that builds when people are forced together without time to heal. They didn’t make eye contact. They didn’t sit near each other. And they definitely didn’t laugh.

They were smart, capable, and burned out. And they were ours for three months.

Blue toy dinosaur on cat sketch, colorful prisma color pencils, duck figure with hat, fire hydrant object, creative and playful setting. — Teaching drawing techniques with the team with T-Rex as Co-instructor.

The Beginning: Splatter as Softening

We started with splatter painting - not because it’s trendy, but because it’s disarming.

There’s something about flinging paint that bypasses the guarded brain and taps into something primal. No one had to talk about trust. They just had to move. And when the first streak of color hit the canvas, something shifted.

By the end of that first session, they were laughing. Not performative laughter. Real, belly-deep, stress-release laughter. One person said, “I haven’t felt this light in months.” Another whispered, “I didn’t realize how much I needed this.”

Month Two: Texture as Trust

We moved into textural art - clay, pulp, and upcycled materials. The team began co-creating objects that required collaboration and patience. They built bowls together, designed stamps for shared values, and sculpted LED-lit paper mache pieces that reflected their evolving identity.

Ownership started to emerge. A junior designer took the lead on a sustainability-themed sculpture. A project manager who’d been quiet for weeks stepped up to guide a lino-cutting session. Roles began to shift - not because we asked them to, but because the space allowed it.

Month Three: Milestones and Meaning

By the final month, they weren’t just a team. They were a community.

They set a shared milestone: “We want to feel proud of how we show up for each other.” And they hit it. Not with a slide deck, but with a collaborative mural that now hangs in their office - a visual reminder of what they built together.

They started rotating leadership roles for internal projects. They created a Slack channel called “Wicked Wins” to celebrate small victories. And they invited us to their team lunch, not as facilitators, but as friends.

One of them said, “This saved our team. I don’t think we’d still be here without it.”