Galvanising the T-Systems Team
A newly promoted manager with a very progressive leadership style, supported by a visionary director, commissioned Dickson Training Ltd to provide a team building programme for 10 IT technical managers, most of which are new to each other, in order to accelerate the forming of the group into a cohesive team.
We conducted research initially to understand the roles and the key challenges - and we had the benefit of gaining access to the director's and manager's vision for the team and for the business.
The theme was customer centricity and ensuring a dynamic response, where each person is empowered and encouraged to take the initiative.
The Value of Research
The research, consisting of confidential interviews with a cross-section of the team, was invaluable in helping us gain an independent understanding of the team operational practices and culture.
It also afforded us to cultivate a very positive rapport with the group, which translated into optimising the time we had to deliver the team building programme at Eynsham Hall in Oxfordshire.
It was ideal to create a notional 'financial theme' where each team challenge (some indoor, but most outdoor) had a commercial target to capture and reflect how their approach, team work and communication would indicate their performance.
Debriefing and Future Benefit
Each task was debriefed in full to embed the learning for application within the business.
The group didn't know each other initially, and had only a limited exposure to their new manager. But by the second team task they were very confident about promoting ideas, challenging proposals and motivating each other to overcome the obstacles they encountered.
Key learning points were garnered that have a direct bearing on how to ensure their commercial performance is optimised. These included ensuring colleagues who are distant from the hub are engaged and encouraged to offer solutions; exploring commercial improvements by negotiating for better margins and upselling additional options; and utilising the teams' intellectual property and significant reservoir of experience.
Team Psychometric Profilers
We also covered a review of the team members' psychometric profilers, which provided all of them with a very clear understanding of their colleagues' motivational drivers and preferred team approach. This was ideal for a much greater understanding between the team's manager and his team members.
They all gained a valuable insight into the composition of the team and identifying any 'gaps' in relation to areas that need to be developed.
This is the perfect opportunity to explore areas where they need to make plans to upgrade their team dynamics and work on a team action plan. It was also an ideal moment for the team's manager to learn - very efficiently - about each of his team members and their preferred leadership style.
The Results
The team's very high commitment level, huge work ethic and camaraderie - along with a very robust sense of commercial determination - resulted in the team achieving their 'notional' financial target from the command tasks.
Much more importantly, they devised a very practical plan on how to fully capitalise on their very strong team commitment, shared vision and confidence in their team, their manager and the business' strategy. These are the ingredients for delivering high levels of success.
4-6 months of evolution of a team towards 'High Performance Status' - fast-forwarded into 2 days.
Team Building by Dickson Training Ltd
Team Building by Dickson Training is fun, commercially focused, efficient and very, very effective.
We have a highly innovative team who design team builds to suit all budgets and time or space restrictions. Large or small, we will develop the perfect event to meet your commercial objectives, keeping in line with your values and company culture. More recently we have combined team galvanising events with ways to engage the participants with and support their local communities. This solution has proved extremely popular with our clients and we are continuing to develop more and more programmes doing exactly this.
To find out more, please visit our team building section by clicking here. Alternatively, please call us on 01937 579 649 or send us an online contact form to discuss your requirements and how we can assist you and your team.