Team Training
Leadership & Teamwork Make the Dream Work!
There is an old saying when it comes to teams: Either we're pulling together or we're pulling apart.
Is Your Team Training Hitting the Mark?
Most business leaders understand that there are significant performance gains to be achieved through teamwork, and yet few organizations have succeeded in getting the results they hoped for.
Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith state in their best-selling book, The Wisdom of Teams:
"Team performance is a fact, not a fad. Unfortunately, so is team frustration and failure. Team training efforts continue to miss the target by focusing on togetherness, open communication and interpersonal dynamics rather than simply getting the basics right."
So if togetherness, open communication and interpersonal dynamics (which form the basis of much of the team development training offered) are not the basics, what are?
Being a Team Member is a Part-Time Role
The first thing to understand is that most teams are not full time teams. In fact, it is very much a part time role. Team members are selected for their knowledge and expertise, and their primary role is to fulfill their individual responsibilities. Yet one could get the impression from much of the team training that is delivered, that you have to be a team member all the time!
Some team members resist participating in teams because they don't see the team member role as distinct from their functional role... often leading to conflict as they argue from their own position rather than looking at issues from the perspective of the team as a whole.
Behavioral Adaptability is an Essential Skill
Effective teamwork cannot be achieved unless team members understand the need to switch from one role to the other. To be effective at switching roles the team member first needs to have the flexibility of mind to mentally switch roles. Secondly, they must have the behavioral adaptability to effectively perform both roles.
Behavioral adaptability requires a high degree of emotional intelligence, which we know can be learned. But it will take time. The emotional competencies of Self-Awareness and Self-Management are essential as we increase the awareness of the need to excel in two roles requiring different behavior and then go through the process of learning to adapt to new habits.
The Motivation to be a Team
The second basic fundamental is that teams must have a significant reason for being a team. If it is not really important to the team members, why would they go through the discomfort and effort to adapt their behavior?
So one of the first things an effective team training program will do is help the team establish what their Team Performance Challenge is. Once they have agreed on an objective that is meaningful and important to all members, working as a team will make a lot of sense.
Team Development is a Process
Turning a potential team into a high performing team takes time — it cannot be achieved as a result of a single event. For that reason Integro has developed a three stage Team Development Process that is designed to be implemented over a 12 to 15 month timeframe. This includes reinforcement sessions and application back in the workplace. For more information, follow the links below.
Experiential Learning: Team Adventure Process
Purpose: The Team Adventure Process is our basic and most popular experiential team training. Each participant will come away with a better understanding of the basic disciplines and necessary skills to become a successful team back in their work environment.
Major Focus:
- Total Quality concepts
- Team Basics
- Four Stages of Team Development
- Communication Skills development
- Diversity / Creativity / Innovation
- Principles of Empowering Leadership
- Problem Solving & Decision Making Skills
- Gaining Consensus
- Focusing on External Customer needs
- Focusing on Internal Customer & Supplier systems
- Measuring Team dynamics
- Trust Building & Safe Risk Taking
Who should attend: Any group of individuals charged with a performance challenge that will require teamwork to accomplish, i.e. intact work teams, internal customer / supplier teams, external customer / supplier teams, management teams, ad-hoc project teams, and cross- functional teams.
Customized Training: All training will be preceded by a consulting day spent with the company to determine their needs and outcomes. This time is well spent and a necessary part to help us understand and customize this team basic session for each customer group.
The Process: Every team will go on a fun and challenging journey to find the " Lost Ark" which has an ancient World Class message that their company has sent them to find. We designed this training to flow through a sequence of experiential activities that will allow them to experience the four stages of team development. After each activity, the team will "circle-up" for a "debriefing session" in order to help the team and each participant to process what has happened and how they can get better. The team will assess themselves before and after the training in Six Team Success Factors: purpose, process, communication, commitment, involvement, and trust as well as assess themselves after each activity for their team dynamic improvements throughout the journey. All this information will be consolidated, graphed and sent back to the team as visualization feedback of their progress in team development.
Benefits: Not only will the participants gain a greater understanding of self, teamwork, total quality concepts, and leadership principles, but they will work more effectively with each other through this common shared experience and renewal of team camaraderie and trust. By helping participants to make connections between theoretical principles and the necessary new behaviors, our experiential team training can be a vital leveraged activity to help unleash the capacity for major change in an organization.
Safety: Our training staff has over 88,000 training hours of experiential team training over a seventeen-year period. We have not had a serious incident on-site or off. Our equipment and facilities are inspected yearly by a major outdoors-experiential company as well as our own pre-group and monthly inspection. Our staff receives updated skills and safety reviews yearly. Just as our staff is committed to safety, we ask for your commitment to uphold our safety guidelines as well.
Challenge-by-Choice: Our training is known for its creative and challenging experiential activities. We believe strongly in and practice the "Challenge-by-Choice" philosophy, which allows each participant the freedom to determine what he or she will do physically. The level of physical participation is not dependent upon attending this training. We have had participants, for whatever reason, who have had minimal to no physical participation later comment on how much they learned and enjoyed the training.
Number of Participants: The minimum number of participants is 12 with the optimal number between 16 – 18. Adjustments always possible.
Length: Our Team Adventure Process session can vary anywhere from a One Day, to a Two and a Half Day process depending on the needs of each team.