One of the critical success factors for every work unit is its ability to work as a team. Possibly the most challenging aspect of any work relationship is differences in personal styles. Understanding – and valuing – individual differences can help avoid potential difficulties, and assist in developing productive and harmonious work relationships
Objectives
Participants will
- Work with the MBTI Personality Indicator as a way of understanding the different ways individuals perceive the world
- Have a framework for responding to the challenges and opportunities that arise from working with others in group situations
- Enhance their ways of working with colleagues and clients whose personality style may be different from their own
- Value differences in others and see mutual usefulness of opposite types
Expected Outcomes
- Improved communication, co-operation, understanding and teamwork;
- Shared agreement about how the team should operate / conduct its business
- An increased feeling of corporate identity and belonging to a team
- A framework for responding to the challenges and opportunities that arise from working with others in group situations.
Key Content
What is a team?
- Team Characteristics
- Group Problem-Solving Exercise: issues of co-operation and competition
- Introduction to different styles of communicating, as a way of understanding the different preferences people have in working together
- MBTI or similar instrument. Assessment of group and individual personality profile followed by a number of activities which will help verify one’s true type
Small group exercises and activities illustrating ways of maximising one’s own style and working with people who have different, complementary or similar styles, for example:
Flexing your style
- Effective and less effective characteristics of each style
- Communicating with different personalities
Formation Of Teams
- Tuckman’s stages of team development
The Skill of Working Together
- Implementing a Feedback Culture
- Giving and receiving feedback, both positive and negative, to enhance an open culture
- Positive Language
Team Audit – How do we operate as a team?
- Talk thru differences in perceptions re styles re organisational climate
- Developing clear behavioural statements at our team level
- How the MBTI concepts and behaviours will be integrated and embedded in the way we work (an opportunity to have a dialogue and find out what it all means = shared understanding)
Action Plan: Where to from here?
- Effective teams are those which have a variety of personality styles and value and appreciate these differences
- How to maximise our strengths and be pre-empt our derailers
- How can things be improved? What should we do more of/less of?
- What workplace norms should be re-enforced or extinguished? How to accomplish this?
Target Audience
This course is specifically designed for team members and team leaders. A discrete team can attend this workshop together, learning and practising crucial team skills and dealing with their specific team issues. Or individual members from several different teams can attend the course at the same time, allowing them to learn and practise the skills in a non- threatening, confidential atmosphere. Also, members of management can attend this course to learn to “model” the behaviors that will be expected of employees throughout the organization.