There’s No Tea in Team
May 11th, 2009Ok. There is. I lied. The first 3 letters are the give-away, of course. It’s a real struggle to come up with a good name for a blog entry, so give me some leeway! Now all I have to do is show some relevance to the title in what I write. Here goes…
I expect there’s a good chance that, like me, you are fed up of hearing “There’s no ‘I’ in team”. And the almost as ubiquitous retort “Ah, but there is a ‘me’”. Leadership by sloganising is not one of the recommendations we make to our client groups here at Sandstone. In fact, we generally don’t make recommendations at all. Each of our team activities has a structured debriefing process associated with it that facilitates maximum learning from the time and effort (not to mention money!) by then spent during the event. Our approach to debriefing helps teams and individuals extract the learning for themselves, with our facilitators adding the odd nudge and the odd word of wisdom by way of ensuring that predefined objectives are adequately covered and met. It is always more powerful when teams and individuals can generate the learning for themselves, rather than being simply told what they should take away.
Such a debrief isn’t compulsory and we often run our activities purely for the fun (did I mention how much fun people have?), but we have noticed that, in these challenging economic times, a much higher percentage of our events now include a sizeable debrief. Clearly, maximising what a client gets out of a given budget has become more important. Rightly so.
Indeed, it’s interesting for us to note that at a time when many companies in our industry are scaling back – in fact one or two have gone under – we are growing in strength. Our learning and development background is reflected in all of our activities and this has made us even more popular with clients in all sectors and with client groups of all levels, shapes and sizes as the economic slowdown has taken a grip.
For the record, I don’t even drink tea. But I am a team player, so maybe my blog title has some truth to it after all!
