Once again I found myself back at Bangkok Marriott Hotel The Surawongse for another team development session.
My brief for this workshop was initially rather vague. It was a group of senior IT professionals from India who had done “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” workshop a couple of years ago and wanted something linked to that to reinforce the learning. But they weren’t sure what exactly.
After a highly productive Teams call I was better able to understand their intentions and presented to them an idea. We would build upon the foundational layer of ‘The Five Dysfunctions’ which looks at the absence of trust within teams. Taking trust as our starting point, we would look at how we can build more agile teams once there is a foundation of trust in place. Something along the lines of this team development workshop.
Since this training workshop was happening at the end of a busy week of meetings and seminars for the group, the organisers also wanted it to have some fun stuff going on as well. I design my training workshops to be as much fun as possible anyway. It’s my style. I don’t stand at the front of the room reading through a bunch of bullet points with a laser pointer. I want things to be fun, interactive, and engaging.
So, in this case, I approached my facilitation in the usual way but added some super fun games along the way. The result was a nice balance of serious learning and fun team bonding. A nice way to end the week. Yes, we discussed the importance of trust within a team, the need for psychological safety, learning from failure, and how their team could become more agile and innovative. Some serious conversations were had. But then, at key points during the session, a complete switch to some hilarious games and plenty of noise which raised a few eyebrows from the hotel event team. Who knew business training sessions could be so much fun?
Once trust and psychological safety are in place, teams can focus on becoming more creative, innovative, and responsive. Coming together quickly to generate solutions, share ideas, and solve problems. My closing activity was designed to act as a business simulation in which teams had to collaborate quickly in the pursuit of profit and swiftly adapt to changing market conditions. A super fun and engaging way to end the session. As always, India showed her competitiveness!
I can’t say I’m a fan of the brown shirts though…