I have recently spent a very constructive & interesting day with a number of people discussing ‘leading teams’ and the importance of this subject…so I thought I would share some of these ideas with you.

Teamwork is crucial to any organisation as we need to make the most of the people that we employ, especially in the current economic climate.  So how do you measure the effectiveness and efficiency of your team? I bet your key measurements are numerical, such as how much we saved or made and I bet you don’t often think about measuring how much trust there is in your team or how much commitment to the objectives of the team.  Yet these are crucial areas that impact on your team’s performance.

Then there is your leadership style…are you a micro-manager or have you got the leadership maturity to know when to demonstrate directive behaviour towards your team and when you need to be supportive and when you need to leave them alone? Having met over 30 team leaders in the last month it is interesting to listen to how we measure success in a team.  It is almost exclusively by numbers: how many boxes we shipped; how much sales revenue we have made and this has very little if anything to do with the qualities that we believe make up a good team.

These qualities are often cited as communication, trust, honesty, support and respect.  So how do you measure how your team are performing in these areas….oh that’s too hard I hear you cry so that’s why I don’t do it.  Exactly!  You can be the best sales team on the planet but if you don’t trust and support each other you are not a team, you are a group of people all reporting to one person.

A team can be successful without selling the most, saving the most or making the best…your role as the manager is to talk to all of them to help them understand how you are going to measure success, what your expectations are of their behaviour towards each other and you and that is all matters.  As Lencioni stated in his book the Five Dysfunctions of a Team and I am paraphrasing here:

Without trust I am vulnerable so I will not challenge the situation.  If I don’t challenge what we are doing I do not buy into it.  So if I do not commit to the situation I am not accountable and therefore I am not interested in the results. This team becomes or is dysfunctional.

However if we all trust each other I will challenge you in our meetings and when we have resolved our differences I will commit to what we have decided to do 100%.  As I am committed to making it happen I therefore realise that I am accountable for the outcome and therefore I will ensure that the results come. Thus this team is functional and performing!

Surely the latter is a much better situation for your as a team leader?

Thanks for your time, Suzanne Unsworth

www.rubusassociates.co.uk

As you may know I have been a delegate recently on a course in my role as church treasurer and it brought to mind one of the biggest issues that we have as professional trainers…how many people do you have on one programme?

Well the answer is, as ever, it depends upon the subject, the competence of the learners and how practical the learning needs to be.  Adult learning theory shows us that we all have a preferred way of learning, be it reflective, and thus need time to consider and review the information or be it active, where the learner wants to get involved. It is therefore important that we as managers & trainers design a learning activity that is suitable for all types of learners, whether it is a five day programme or a 20minute tool box talk.

You may be in the fortunate situation that you know the learners whom you will be training and so with that greater insight you can provide a much more bespoke learning experience.  However, if you are running open courses, such as those that I am involved in, you have no idea about the learners preferred way of learning.  You must therefore design & develop your training programme to suit all four learning styles as identified by Honey & Mumford.  Be aware that you are likely to design a training programme that suits your learning style and thus will bore the pants off other types of learner.  I am an activist and like to ‘do stuff’ on a course, so this recent learning experience, which was aimed at reflectors, was hard work!!

Your other consideration is what you are training your people on…on my course there were 50 of us, so there was no chance for the trainer to spend time with us on an individual basis, so there was no practical learning or experience.  This was not too bad for a subject like accounting practice and there were three trainers so their different styles helped to maintain attention. However it is not how training IT subjects would work at all, for example, as people want to be hands on & practical with these subjects…people need to practice the skills as they are being taught them, not just watch the upteenth PowerPoint slide!

The final and most pragmatic answer to the question is that of cost or sales, depending on how you look at this situation.  I recently saw an advert for a ‘hands on, interactive training session where you will be one of only 4 delegates’ which I thought was fantastic.  It was for a very practical subject and meant that you as the delegate knew you would have a lot of attention from the trainer and therefore, able to get a lot of hands on experience with good supervision.  But this approach may not work in an organisation where you have to train a lot of people at once because they can only be released from their job all together, when the line is closed for example, in a manufacturing environment.

Commercial considerations also have to be made especially if you are charging people for attending the programme.   You have to cover the venue costs, costs of the trainer and materials that you produce as well as refreshments and you are a business so you need to run this at a profit.  So this may be the biggest influence on the numbers you train and in my experience this is very often the case.  So despite you, as a professional trainer, explaining that the maximum number for a particular course is X people the company put X+ on the course as they will make more money, but will the learning happen?!

I hope that this has been thought provoking!

Thanks for your time, Suzanne Unsworth

www.rubusassociates.co.uk

Creating the right learning environment

I have just recently been a delegate on a course, not for me as a trainer, but for me in my role as church treasurer.  It was good to be on the receiving end of the learning for a change and enabled me to get a good insight into the perspective of the learner.

Venues vary tremendously from client to client and hotel to conference centre but as a trainer it is one of the areas that nobody tells you about.  Very often you have to spend the first 10-15 minutes setting up or sorting out the room to make it conducive to the learning of your delegates.  This had been thought about a little in the venue I was at….yes there was daylight and yes we could all see the screen for the PowerPoint presentation, but you couldn’t see the presenters and if you had been at the front you would’ve disturbed a lot of people if you had wanted to go out for a wee.

People who design meeting rooms, conference rooms and church halls and want to sell them for training forget that if you are a trainer you will want to walk in amongst your delegates not lecture from the front...this is especially true if you are an experiential trainer.  Yet the designers/IT people insist in putting the plugs in the middle of the floor so you have to tip toe through the cables all day.  Or the tables are fixed so that you cannot move them, this means that not only can you not move from the front very easily, but also the exercises that you have designed for small groups are very hard to facilitate….or even just getting people to work in small groups is restricted by the furniture.

Daylight is also so important for assisting the attention span of the delegates as well as allowing fresh air to be circulated.  I have trained in a number of venues without natural light and as the trainer you have to take this into consideration with your delegates and their learning capacity.  Last week as a delegate it was great that some of the daylight was allowed into the room, however because the session was completely tutor led and driven by PowerPoint half the windows had to be covered so people could see the screen!!

The other key area to consider is the seating arrangements; can all the delegates see the visual aids that you will be using? Can they see you? How well can they see each other?  This latter point is very important if a high percentage of your programme is based around facilitated discussions. Hopefully as well, the seats will have arms as this assists the comfort of your delegates.  Remember that the mind will only take in as much information as the posterior can endure!!

You also have to consider the number of people that you will have attending your session….I was one of 50 people last week, so yes, it was a lecture not a learning session, consequently there was little interaction between learner and trainer which for learning styles like mine (active, participative) was not good at all.  In fact I spent a lot of the time on my social media sites…my apologies to the trainer but I was bored and that is a whole other subject to talk about in the future!!

So lets make our learning environments more conducive to learning and ensure that our learning outcomes are met and we don’t bore our delegates to death!!

Thanks for your time, Suzanne Unsworth

www.rubusassciates.co.uk