Advanced Team Building

“The basic building block of good teambuilding is for a leader to promote the feeling that every human being is unique and adds value.”

Anonymous

Suppose you have been in charge of a team and have been leading them for a while. You have followed management guidelines and tried hard to bring people together to improve communications and truly illustrate the importance of cooperative teamwork.

As a result, the team became better, took on bigger projects and delivered successful results, either in the form of services or generating new products.

However, after a while, you may start to notice that the team is beginning to get ahead of itself. Due to their past success, they start to feel invincible. Their success means they stop listening or observing what is happening around them. They ignore the obvious signals that the market is changing. They are so eager to agree with each other on all accounts that they become afraid of raising their concerns even when they can clearly see a given decision will be disastrous.

The team therefor becomes the victim of its own success. There is only one way to avoid this sad eventuality; a team must be monitored and managed continuously as it matures and as team members’ behaviour change based on the team’s history, achievements and failures.

This course follows from the Team Building course and covers a series of insights on what happens when a group of people interact with other over an extended amount of time and their relationship matures. Ultimately the responsibility to maintain the health of a team rests with the team leader. This course is ideal for teams who already have some experience in leading their team and want to make sure their continuous leadership remains relevant. The course helps avoid falling victim to unwanted management biases, become aware of known paradoxical effects, handle mismanaged conflicts, manage agreement and so on.

A variety of techniques and tools such as how to resolve conflicts, mediate or carrying out an impact analysis are also explored.

The course contains many examples, case studies, conversations and anecdotes. Interactive exercises are designed explicitly to help delegates practice the skills and tools during the course.

In addition, several traditional team building exercises are also bundled with this package which a team leader can use to run team building events for their teams.

In this highly practical course participants will learn:

What is Groupthink?

• What is the origin of groupthink?
• How does groupthink affect the performance of a team?
• How can you identify the symptoms of groupthink?
• What strategies can you use to prevent groupthink?

How to Manage Agreement

• What happens when agreement is not managed well?
• What are the symptoms of badly managed agreement?
• What are the 5 main landmarks that help identify if there is a problem in the team?
• What methodologies can help you address agreement issues?

How to Empower a Team

• How can you help team members to achieve better results and feel more capable?
• What strategies help prevent team members from falling into negative and destructive mentality?
• What are the two useful principles you can apply to yourself and your team to increase self-esteem and subsequently team productivity?
• What is the effect of self-fulfilling prophecies on a team and how to manage it?

How to Provide Balanced Management

• What are the fundamental contrasting forces at play while managing a team?
• How to spot a management bias and what to aim for in order to address such biases
• How can these contrasting forces lead to a downward spiral of mismanagement leading to a destructive mentality by a leader?

How to Manage Conflicts

• What kind of conflicts can you expect in a team?
• Are all conflicts bad?
• What statements might lead to a confrontational conversation?
• How can you handle and avoid such confrontational conversations?
• How to use conflict mapping to address conflicts in a team

How to Mediate

• Why do you need mediation strategies?
• What are the best-practice guidelines when mediating?
• How to take advantage of the 7-Step Technique to Mediate

What is Impact Analysis?

• Where and why should you use an impact analysis?
• What are the results of an impact analysis?
• How can you use an Impact Analysis Tool to systematically analyse decision making?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: Team Building

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Advanced 

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Control the effect of groupthink to improve decision making, creativity and team efficiency
• Help prevent your team from making the wrong decisions
• Increase people’s efficiency by helping them grow and preventing them from falling into a destructive mentality
• Balance contrasting forces influencing your team to keep the team at peak productivity
• Map out a conflict in preparation of a resolution and also use verbal techniques to manage confrontational statements
• Use the 7-Step Mediation Technique to resolve a conflict
• Apply an Impact Analysis systematically using a 5-Step Technique