Why should I flex my style to other people, why can’t they flex to mine for once!?
How do we help people like this to take a different perspective?……Any way we can think of! This really does sum up our approach to training individuals or teams: we think creatively about our approach. We incorporate the whole range of tools at our disposal in our development processes e.g. psychometrics, 360 feedback, role players and scenarios etc.
Maybe the issues are not simply about knowledge and skills, maybe we need to consider motivations, values, confidence, or perhaps a new mindset.
So what do we train individuals or the team members in? In truth, that’s not really how we think about things. We work with you to look at the challenges facing your people and your business, and then look at the kind of skills, mindsets and behaviours that delegates will require. Typically however, these would fall into the areas of leadership, people skills, working in teams, strategy development, mentoring, coaching and change management.
Sometimes a brief will be very specific e.g. “We want you to run a programme on influencing”. At other times it will be very broad e.g. “I have a team that just isn’t performing; can you spend a day with them?”
We employ both structured and less structured ways of understanding and diagnosing team issues. It’s an irony that people who ‘like’ each other less, produce more when they can work well together. Initially (or perhaps for years!), different personalities can clash – particularly when things are pressured, yet be truly effective, teams need a mix of contrasting people with different talents, views and perspectives. Team building or team re-building can greatly accelerate the process of becoming an effective team. It helps people to better understand others’ natures whilst also recognise the shared goals, agree on the ideal values and culture of the team. And that’s when they really begin to deliver results.
And it’s not just about having a good time on a team day. We prefer to work with substantive and real issues and opportunities, making sure not merely to ‘paper over the cracks’ in the short term.