Ensuring your team members have the skills needed to meet the ever-changing demands of your organization and customers is essential to your company’s success and creates opportunities for future growth and scalability.

As organizations look to reskill and upskill their workforce, understanding where their current staff is lacking or what their future customers are expecting is the first step.

Team member development can happen in a variety of ways from mentorship and coaching to classes and while in-person learning is currently rare to non-existent fortunately more and more opportunities for virtual and augmented training are emerging.

Team member development used to consist of mostly training classes on hard skills like excel or word.  Fortunately, organizations have evolved beyond training classes recognizing that team member development encompasses a gambit of soft skills, which an accelerated remote workforce has revealed an even greater need for.

Regardless the type of skill or if it is reskill or upskill, they are all part of learning and development, helping companies gain and retain top talent while improving productivity and increasing bottom line.

Let’s face it, It’s a win-win for everyone!

Teamwork and team building are an increasingly important part of the corporate culture.

The objectives of team building boosts team member engagement, establishes solidarity by creating a shared memory, breaks down barriers, enhances social relations and connects remote teams and workers.  When team building exercises are designed around development or team training, they tend to fall flat and feel more like just another day in the office.

Wikipedia defines team building as:

“a collective term for various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within teams, often involving collaborative tasks. It is distinct from team training, which is designed by a combine of business managers, learning and development/OD (Internal or external) and an HR Business Partner (if the role exists) to improve the efficiency, rather than interpersonal relations.”

What are you hoping to achieve outside of the basic objectives; relieving tension, rewarding achievement, problem solving, goal setting, fostering interpersonal relations or simply to just have fun?

Answering that question will help determine if your team building session is a volunteer project, picnic, destination outing, scavenger hunt, structured indoor activity (game, discussion topics, cooperative assignments, group brainstorming) or virtual activity.

Click HERE to see a case study of an all-day session I had with one of my client’s teams.

We all know people we work with who have a low EQ (emotional intelligence) and could benefit from personal development.  They are unable to accept feedback, zero ability to read body language, believe they are smarter than everyone in the room and make you cringe if you have to bring an idea to them. Ironically, they would never think they needed personal development, or development of any kind for that matter.

Then there are those that simply want to be better. Maybe they wonder if they should come across differently in the moment, or they have received feedback about how they present themselves and want to change it.  Maybe when they make a mistake it takes the wind out of their sails, or they try to be everything to everyone. Regardless of the why, they want different results.

The first step is self-awareness and self-acceptance. By understanding your strengths and weaknesses, aligning decisions with your core beliefs, and reflecting (honestly) on feedback, you will begin to know your authentic self.

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”  ̶  Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a great listener and value the relationships that I build with people. My depth of experience comes from over 25 years of building and growing companies, the experience of leading complex teams, developing employees and emerging leaders, and participating as a mentor in several mentorship programs, not to mention the many lessons I have learned along the way. 

Let’s start this journey together! Email me at Letsgo@tknappadvisory.com.