Four Ways To Consider When Developing Your Team

Hi there and welcome. It’s Kerstin Jatho here from 4Seeds Consulting, a transformational coach who shifts people from languishing to flourishing. In this video, I want to talk to you about four factors on how to grow and develop your team. Training, workshops, and development programmes do not have a good reputation.

Very often, people are enrolled into training workshops and development programmes that they don’t feel they need, which is a lot of wasting of resources. Both time, energy, and money.

I mean, let’s provide a flippant example. Why would you want to learn or attend a Spanish language class if you actually want to learn Mandarin? Isn’t that a waste of time? And that’s exactly what happens in organisations. Very often, the clarity is not there on what employees actually need, and because that need is not clear, every workshop or programme is thrown at them in the hope that something will stick, but employees are tired of that. They really want to have programmes and workshops that grow and develop them. Over and above for the company, you want to really use and spend your money wisely.

So, four ways to start to understand what your employees’ needs are and to customise your workshops and trainings according to that are:

Step 1

Firstly, to understand what your employee needs are. You can have that through surveys or one-on-one conversations, but what really do they require to either perform an activity, change their behaviour, achieve the strategic objective. And you’ll be surprised, it’s most likely going to be more on life skills and softer skills than on technical skills.

Step 2

The second one is that it is very powerful to introduce the combination of workshops and coaching. And the reason is that sending somebody to a workshop and then asking them to convert that learning 24 hours later into the workplace is very unlikely to happen. Whereas if you dovetail with coaching, they are held accountable and they have an external person that can help them to integrate this learning on a regular basis.

These coaching programmes don’t have to be very long. You can sometimes do them for a month or three months, but that combination is the most cost effective for organisations as well as the optimal learning time for employees.

Step 3

The third one is to really look at the time scope of a learning and development programme. A half day or a full day is not the answer. You are really just cramming it into people and they’re not going to integrate it. So, often it is taking it slower but steadier, which is more important. So sometimes three- or nine-month interventions really demonstrate the change in behaviour.

Step 4

And the fourth one is to have conversations and also establish how specifically the training or the learning is going to be integrated by the individual or the team. Especially if you are sending an entire team, everybody’s going to walk out with different things that they want to implement, but collectively as a team, what do you want to work on together and create that?

So that conversation is also very necessary. And how are you going to measure process and progress that you are actually moving forward? The more prepared organisations are and focus on what their employees need and what they would like to get out of workshops, the better one can deliver them.

Otherwise, there will continue being just a lot of resources spent that are unnecessary. I’d like to invite you to perform an audit with your team and establish what are the skills or their needs that they need the most, and then work from there.

Perhaps it’s something you can offer internally. Perhaps it’s something a team member can actually deliver, or it’s something external, but the clearer you become on what the need is, the more you can honour it.

Over to you for sharing your comments and experiences.

What process do you use to choose training for your employees?