More About Villa Consultancy

Mike Villa is the principle and founder of Villa Consultancy. His leadership and team-building experience span 35 years. It includes leading a Marine Corps squad during Desert Storm, commanding a regional Police SWAT team, and providing vision and purpose to two different police organizations as a police chief. Mike retired as the chief of the Port of Seattle Police Department in 2026.

During Mike’s 13 years on a special weapons and tactics team he experienced one of the highest functioning teams on which he has served. This team had to produce its intended results or the consequences could be catastrophic. As Mike came off the team and moved into upper management, he did not experience the same level of openness, passionate debate, commitment to the mission, peer-to-peer accountability, and consistent attention to results. This left him wanting and pursuing more for these teams.

In 2012, he was introduced to Patrick Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the follow up book The Advantage. This material captured the same dysfunctions that Mike has seen hinder teams from reaching their true potential. Patrick provided strategies to counter these dysfunctions and a template that would lead teams and organizations to greater cohesion and clarity, and subsequently greater performance and results.

Mike had seen firsthand the principles described by Patrick being worked out in the police special operations world. Determined to elevate his command team to high performance, he used the material in The Advantage and he developed his first workshop, “Building a Winning Team.” He has since facilitated workshops and applied those same practices for various teams for over a decade with much success. His workshops follow the same approach used by Patrick Lencioni and the TableGroup.

Mike knows the value of having cohesive leadership teams and how leadership teams either create confusion and politics or clarity and health within an organization. Mike, in his post-law enforcement years, desires to share what he has learned with other leaders who want to elevate their teams and build better organizations. He therefore established Villa Consultancy in 2024.