Winning team building events
The Winning Team Building Event By Business Meetings Malta
1. Every programme has a start and finish, but a successful training programme continues to develop, grow, and ultimately duplicate, for this to happen it requires, vision, leadership, and the courage to dare to fail.
THE STARTING POINT THEN IS THERE ARE NO BOUNDARIES AND COMPLICITY.
The team then, should include all of the Four Personality Traits, this will guarantee enthusiasm, leadership, organisation, and diplomacy. Four fundamentals to developing sound structure to an idea and workable system. Too many of one kind of personality trait would see a singular structure, narrow ideas, lack of direction, lack of momentum, become ego driven, and ultimately fail, causing mayhem on the way.
CHOOSE WISELY YOUR TEAM, AN EVEN BALANCE OF PERSONALITIES IS THE PRIORITY, WITHOUT BIASE, SELECT CAREFULLY AND CREATE A TEAM, WHERE EVERYBODY WILL EDDIFY FOR THE GOOD OF THE PROGRAMME
The most exciting part of the any Winter training programme is the moulding together of all the personalities. In every management team, the key to this is to focus on the edification process, this is simple but not easy, with a imbalance of personality traits.
"My natural personality had to be suppressed to enable the team to develop naturally, I was very conscious of my role as the sports psychologist, but that was secondary to developing the team firstly. After identifying the toughest nuts to crack, I proceeded to edify these people in front of the management team and the team. The management team over a 3month period started to gel, and unconsciously began to lead the sessions, me acting only as a facilitator, and now being able to implement my subject to the athletes, with the members of the management team reinforcing my position, through the edification process, this is known in the business world as a Win Win position. Having got to the first tee, we could all in the management team and coaching staff, start to explore our ideas and more importantly test each other's abilities without fear of reprisals. A very healthy environment to create thinking outside the box. But let's just explore the subject of Personalities that existed in just the Management and Coaching team. We inherited a team of people that were highly driven with expressive opinions and ideas, using the books Personality Plus, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and The Eight Traits of a Champion, as a premise for my understanding of simple but effective human behaviour and the idiosyncrasies that we "all" possess I started to realise that nurture was preferable to control. With the natural drive through personality alone the next task was to find the members of the team to give the much needed skills of diplomancy, organisation and a personality to appeal to the introverted members of the squad. Whilst they were a minority in the management and coaching team they did exist ,but how to use their much needed skills was the issue. Tese personality types tend to be introverted , happily working behind the scenes , generally avoiding the limelight, however these people were essential to the success, of the winter programme, and more importantly fundamental to developing the players within the squad. My approach here was to spend time on a one to one basis over a lengthy period of time gaining their confidence, exploring their thought process and their organisational skills. These then had to be sold to all the others . With the edification process constantly in my conscious I had to get these introverted details to these people to be listenened and respected. So we decided that for everybody to gain experience from all parties present, all managers would be present at the psychology sessions, and it was here that I encouraged our introverted personalities to impart their knowledge and skills by subtly asking them questions during my presentations, slowly bringing them to the forefront, showing the squad members that there were other people in the management team that were like themselves, and therefore giving them options to progress and work with managers and coaches who suited their personality trait. The spin off from this was that the introverted squad members were more readily accepting to speaking in front of their peers and so this wonderful process of edification was complete and as the duplication takes hold, the results would start to come."
USE EDIFICATION TO CREATE A WIN WIN SCENARIO FOR BOTH LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS
To take young athletic talent,and given the huge responsibility, to develop these future stars of the game of golf,I felt it was critical to see how the team of people taking on this responsibility would react when they were taken outside of their comfort zone. After all that's where we were going to take each member of the squad at some time through the winter training programme, so for me as a sports psychologist this became, and transpired to be the most challenging part of developing a truly top class team. I needed the confidence of the lead manager for support. This I had, now I had to find one of the coaches on the team. I decided to take the newest coach to the Sussex set up. The reasons were numerous, but fundamentally, it was a coach who I'd worked with as a player, I had his confidence, and his trust so no real objections would be expected. I still had work to do to gain the confidences of the other coaches, at this stage of the programme I didn`t want any complications, so I opted for the easy route, and I wanted to put my ideas in action whilst everybody was on my side and the timing felt right. It's important to "manoeuvre and not manipulate people or situations" and the mind set I adopted to guarantee the right approach was to become the coach ,unconsciously to the other members of the team, this was the risk and my first conscious decision to adopt the no boundaries philosophy. What is meant by no boundaries, there still must be guidelines to the concept of "no boundaries". Firstly morally it must suit the purpose, and secondly it should collectively, stimulate, educate, and thirdly test the athlete and or person under pressure outside normal circumstances. If you're able to remove, social, technical, political physical and mental boundaries, then without obstacles the capacity of the mind should and will become expansive, allowing the recipient to explore their true boundaries as opposed to learnt or perceived boundaries. We as human beings will self impose boundaries on ourselves, based usually on past experiences, or perceived likes or dislikes at different times in our lives, and as we change we still hang on to old and restrictive boundaries, based mostly on how we perceive ourselves. The word boundary could be substituted by the word border, my role as a sports psychologist is to explore the athletes borders of their minds. How far and what will they be prepared to explore and change to achieve their goals and can they develop a mind set to achieve these under pressure that's why I believe removing boundaries is important.
Taking risks is fun especially when removing learnt or perceived boundaries, define the athletes borders, then go to work
The management and coaching team were now merging as a group of individuals working for a singular goal. The first real achievement so far, and with this came ownership and responsibility, empowerment was the fundamental result from the first six months of working together, and all involved began to contribute greatly to the development of the winter training programme. With inertia and positive momentum, members of the team were comfortable challenging ideas, making a healthy environment for debate and discussion, however this did manifest at times some de-edification which on numerous occasions I had to placate. As the saying goes, For every action there is a reaction, I believe that de-edification is born out of frustration not malice especially with this particular group of personalities on this team. It was at this time I began questioning and reviewing the chartered course mapped out in my mind, which ultimately was to prepare the athlete for competition in and outside the game, and to create and sustain a environment in which we could promote fun, improve skill levels, and create a team from a predominantly individual game. The added complication of gelling these athletes together, to culminate in taking twenty hormonal, and highly competitive golfers to a foreign country for a week's winter training, hadn`t even crossed my mind. On reflection I'm glad that the success we had with both tours was because focus was not given to the tour, but to the athletes individual and collective team needs, the reason for the successful weeks in Malta was the by product of some exceptional leadership and management of young people, coupled with first rate coaching achieved for the right reasons. Although this took two years, it is my belief that in fact for the work to be successful and to stand real scrutiny it must duplicate and produce the results desired for the team as a squad, ultimately producing the best players in the country
FOR EVERY ACTION THERE WILL BE A REACTION THE SKILL IS HOW SHOULD I REACT FOR THE GREATER GOOD, WE CAN DICTATE HOW WE ACT
So the real skill then is how do you duplicate success of a management and coaching structure when individual athletes and leadership change. It`s my belief this can produced by documented and implemented systems by reviewing what worked, taking this as fundamentals ,and here`s the key. Improving on it without altering or deviating away from key success principals. Taking time now to discuss and document the key reasons for the success of both winter training programmes will pay huge dividends for the future programmes. These discussions should be in open forum almost in a brain storming session definitely involving the golfers. There are no wrong or right answers, honesty is the key, discuss without personnel beliefs and stay focused on the reason, that being the improvement of the programme for the betterment of the team, with a system that can be duplicated . Do not slip into the trap of letting the easy most enjoyable parts be the basis of the system. Spend time on evaluating the pros and cons. A classic example of discussing all that is the existing programme is to individually write down your thoughts, ideas, and views. Bring them to the table and discuss firstly common concepts, this will form the basis for the fundamentals for the system, the individual outside the box thoughts could be discussion for improving the system or programme. Do it now while the thoughts and experiences are fresh. Everybody that was part of the training programme and tour should be involved to give a clear and concise picture, this then takes us back to the start of No boundaries and Complicity.
Now take hold of the new jewels in your possession. When I realised the potential in the team coaches, and managers my energy levels increased and any ideas that where outside the box I knew would be discussed and transformed into workable structure. Will I ever be fortunate enough to work with such special athletes coaches and managers again, I doubt it, but at least I did it once in my lifetime and I thank you all so much for the privilege. Now take hold of this fledgling concept which is yours, and make it grow for the good of the business and sport and for all, people team building is the key.
To book your next conference or meeting team building event please click here
Or contact directly Theresa Delia at Business Meetings Malta, the free conference venue finding company and DMC
theresa@businessmeetingsmalta.com