Our Values
These are the beliefs that shape every moment of our work at Arrants McSwain.
- We believe every person has intrinsic value and should be treated that way.
- We believe problems within a team are a solvable reality.
- We believe strong leaders take responsibility for their inner life.
- We believe the leader's responsibility is to set up each member of their team for success.
How We Got Started
Celia King founded Arrants McSwain Team Building in 2012 after her 18-year career as a university administrator and adjunct faculty member.
During her career in higher education, a theme emerged in Celia’s work. No matter what roles or responsibilities she held, Celia built teams. She saw the world as groups of teams going about their life and work together. A group of students travelling to Hong Kong became a team. A group of faculty on a committee became a team. A departmental meeting became a team. She even saw the classroom as a team of students learning together for a semester. Sometimes Celia was the leader of the team, sometimes not. But she always held that team mindset.
Celia earned her Master’s Degree in Communication at the University of Akron to learn how strong teams communicate. She got certified to use the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and eventually achieved MBTI Master Practitioner status because understanding personalities makes for stronger teams. She became a CQ Certified Facilitator because cultural differences shape teams. She studied emotional intelligence and strengths-based approaches and experiential education and the neuroscience of how stress affects teams. She read everything she could about groups working together and started designing team building experiences of her own.
Eventually other universities asked her to help them build their teams. So she took her academic ideas, practical experience and common sense and founded Arrants McSwain Team Building. Celia put together a team of associates who each offers their own layer of expertise while sharing the principles and values of strong team-making. We have since worked with groups as diverse as college students studying abroad, professional ministers leading congregations and IT executives working in Fortune 500 companies. Our work is mostly focused in Northeast Ohio (Cleveland, Akron, and Canton) and we also travel to Columbus and Cincinnati.
During her career in higher education, a theme emerged in Celia’s work. No matter what roles or responsibilities she held, Celia built teams. She saw the world as groups of teams going about their life and work together. A group of students travelling to Hong Kong became a team. A group of faculty on a committee became a team. A departmental meeting became a team. She even saw the classroom as a team of students learning together for a semester. Sometimes Celia was the leader of the team, sometimes not. But she always held that team mindset.
Celia earned her Master’s Degree in Communication at the University of Akron to learn how strong teams communicate. She got certified to use the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and eventually achieved MBTI Master Practitioner status because understanding personalities makes for stronger teams. She became a CQ Certified Facilitator because cultural differences shape teams. She studied emotional intelligence and strengths-based approaches and experiential education and the neuroscience of how stress affects teams. She read everything she could about groups working together and started designing team building experiences of her own.
Eventually other universities asked her to help them build their teams. So she took her academic ideas, practical experience and common sense and founded Arrants McSwain Team Building. Celia put together a team of associates who each offers their own layer of expertise while sharing the principles and values of strong team-making. We have since worked with groups as diverse as college students studying abroad, professional ministers leading congregations and IT executives working in Fortune 500 companies. Our work is mostly focused in Northeast Ohio (Cleveland, Akron, and Canton) and we also travel to Columbus and Cincinnati.
Why Arrants McSwain?
During the years Celia worked at Malone University, she kept pictures in her office of grandmothers who were strong, smart and resourceful. These women had little to no formal education but plenty of common sense. Those pictures kept her grounded in gratitude for the opportunity to work in higher education and served as a reminder that ideas only matter if they apply to real life. Arrants and McSwain are maiden names of those grandmothers.
Why Myers Briggs and Horses?
Myers Briggs and Equine Assisted Learning may seem like an unusual combination, but common sense and delight drove us to it. After 26 years of studying teams and team building, these are the best methods we found to build strong teams and have fun in the process. Our programs integrate strong thinking and logic with the more intuitive, gut-oriented processes of leadership.
Arrants McSwain opened its doors using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as our central tool for team building and executive coaching. It's simply the most effective and efficient way we found to help teams improve their communication and self regulation. And we love that it starts from a posture of strength that validates a person's natural personality preferences even while it helps identify places of extremes that need to be addressed.
We added Equine Assisted Learning in 2017. Celia was introduced to working with horses in the early 2010's when associates Rachel Lantz Long and Griffin Long focused on using horses in their work as therapists. Celia was taken with the idea that as herd animals, horses are one of nature’s most natural team members with plenty to teach humans about strong teams. So she got certified as an Equine Experiential Education Association Practitioner and completed a course in Natural Lifemanship Training. Working with horses has proven to be a natural complement to the Myers Briggs work. In addition to being as effective and efficient in team building and leadership development, the innovative approach of Equine Assisted Learning provides balance by getting people out of the office into an "uncorporate" environment and allows for more intuitive experiences to understand ways nonverbal interactions shape teams.
Arrants McSwain opened its doors using the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as our central tool for team building and executive coaching. It's simply the most effective and efficient way we found to help teams improve their communication and self regulation. And we love that it starts from a posture of strength that validates a person's natural personality preferences even while it helps identify places of extremes that need to be addressed.
We added Equine Assisted Learning in 2017. Celia was introduced to working with horses in the early 2010's when associates Rachel Lantz Long and Griffin Long focused on using horses in their work as therapists. Celia was taken with the idea that as herd animals, horses are one of nature’s most natural team members with plenty to teach humans about strong teams. So she got certified as an Equine Experiential Education Association Practitioner and completed a course in Natural Lifemanship Training. Working with horses has proven to be a natural complement to the Myers Briggs work. In addition to being as effective and efficient in team building and leadership development, the innovative approach of Equine Assisted Learning provides balance by getting people out of the office into an "uncorporate" environment and allows for more intuitive experiences to understand ways nonverbal interactions shape teams.