Team Management Training Course

Teamwork with managerial teams can be tricky. Why? Well, to be a manager and to climb the greasy pole of organizational hierarchy, you need to assert your individuality.

You need to rely on your own resources. You are ultimately rewarded for being an individual. And then, when you arrive around the table and eyeball your management colleagues, you are told that you need to be a team player. Its not that managers aren’t team players necessarily. Its just that teamwork wasn’t what got them to the top of the totem pole in the first place.

Effective team management training course requires a different type of approach. The traditional team management courses of swinging from trees, doing ropes courses and outdoor experiential team building exercises aren’t suitable at the senior level.

Building a raft and transporting the team across a crocodile infested creek, is not all that effective at this level … or safe!

So, what are the alternative.

I think at the senior team what is important is to understand the styles and approaches colleagues adopt to make decisions, deliberate, and communicate. This is based on well-founded research from Meredith Belbin that whenever people come together to function as a team, they naturally play certain roles. These roles are sometimes unconsciously performed and not clear to colleagues.

For instance, someone may naturally be inclined to promote the good work of the team to other key stakeholders and suggest opportunities to do so. While others might be impatient and want to thrust forward and organize a plan-of-action.

Whatever the role that people play in teams, they can serve an important function at the right time and in the right place. But to do this, managers need to understand what these roles are and who likes to play them.

Team management training then focuses on roles and the way managers like to function when working in this, or any other, team. This exercise is done by completing a diagnostic online that generates a comprehensive report of how that manager can best utilize his or her preferences in team contexts.

In the team management training course, an awareness of these roles is facilitated in a structured, practical, and safe way.

The entire team can then be mapped. This provides the team with the opportunity to discuss its strengths and opportunities for growth. For instance, if everyone in the team wants to organize, then the obvious team strength is planning and executing.

But the blind spot is the team may be that being so keen to get down to ‘business’ and get results, it may forget to devote enough time to assessing and developing a way forward. The result with therefore be sub-optimal.

The team management training course can therefore benefit both the individual and etam overall. This is a more constructive way to train senior management teams. After all, they spend a considerable amount of time sitting around board tables and approach business with their own unique style and approach.

By understanding and coming to terms with the various styles and approaches around the board table, team members start to understand and accept the various contributions that are present at these meetings.

This style of team management training course is very useful when the team needs to recruit a new member to the team. Given the choice between two technically competent managers, the decisive can be make based on the role preference of the team member.

For instance, if the team is lacking creativity and innovation, the candidate with a preference in this area is likely to enrich the team with the exercising of this preference in team deliberations.

In our training we share everyone’s preferences so that the manager’s colleagues can more effectively approach other team members with their role preferences in mind. This assists communication and improves productivity at the team level. The leader of this team can also defer to various colleagues based on their role preferences, apart from their functional specialization.

Being a team player is recast as working with and through other peoples’ preferences to get the job done. This is a more effective and pragmatic approach to team management training course at the senior team levels of the organization.