Teambuilding

Most StartUps do not have enough people to carry out the many and complex tasks successfully. How do you ensure that you make the best use of your scarce manpower? The answer is... through teambuilding!

Nobody is perfect, but a team can be (almost)!

When you recruited carefully, you have very talented people in your team. But the challenges are huge in most HiTech and BioTech StartUps.

Apart from the complimentarity in technical knowledge, personal networks inside and outside the StartUp, different backgrounds in earlier careers... you also need different leadership, communication and thinking styles. Whatever the situation, someone has to be able to raise their voice, smile and take the lead.

Therefore, you have every interest in building great mutual trust between colleagues and employees who think, feel and act differently. How can we achieve big results in a short time?

There are many ways to teambuilding, we will briefly explain two of them.

Behavioural preferences in teambuilding

By means of the MBTI, a standardised and validated personality questionnaire, participants gain practical insights into their own behavioural styles, their strengths and weaknesses as individuals and as a team. The team members experience how they are triggered differently, their differences in perceiving, deciding and organising and what the advantages and working points of each of these differences are. They learn to enjoy diversity in the team instead of being annoyed by it. This helps them to communicate more successfully, influence inside and outside the team, make decisions, deal with positive differences of opinion as well as friction and conflict, stress and constant change. A good start for teambuilding, is it not?

We provide detailed individual and team feedback on 20 aspects of behavioural preferences and present and experience this through pleasant, interactive, safe teaching methods. Positive use of people's talents, and stimulating and supporting each other in this, is central. And teambuilding should also be fun (at least, at times)!

A common way of working with the MBTI is that after filling in the questionnaire individually (online, about 20 minutes), we practise with the whole team for two half-days recognising our positive differences and using them to bring about mutual trust, positive influence and constructive differences of opinion. When there is a need, later meetings can be used as refreshers, refinement and deepening the teambuilding.

The MBTI is the most widely used behavioural preference questionnaire in the world. We are certified for both Step I and Step II team coaching.

In order to optimise group interaction, participation of a maximum of twelve participants is recommended. For larger teams, it is recommended to organise a pragmatic cascade.

Individual participants will find additional depth useful: e.g. in case of high introversion, "chaotic" organisation, stress, change weariness, difficulties in influencing, leadership, entrepreneurship and many other development issues.

One of the many possible results (rows in the figure below are - depending on the work theme - the most important behavioural preferences; individual results in the columns are shared in a safe way in the team and the benefits of the differences are experienced).

Interaction styles

By means of the circumplex model, the most well-known form of which is Leary's Rose, differences in dealing with each other can be visualised in a fun, interactive way. We experience in a playful way how complementing each other can make a team great. Both personal and team preferences are discussed, each with their pros and cons.

We clarify the effects of our behaviour on others, and vice versa, so that conversations and meetings become productive investments. We establish relationships with leadership, communication, influencing and decision-making styles and how we can improve each other in these. We identify what causes pleasant teamwork (green behaviour), the risks of orange behaviour, and the adverse effects of 'going berserk' (and how to do things differently).

Depending on the size of the team, we choose different approaches. The more interactive we can work, the more the change in teamwork will take hold.

Here, too, a time investment of one to two half-days of teambuilding will be needed to touch the hearts and minds of all team members.

Other themes

We have long-term and in-depth expertise in all kinds of teambuilding work forms (e.g. brown paper excersises)which can accelerate team building: giving and receiving feedback, mission and vision, SWOT analyses...

Our teambuilding interventions are not focused on the working method, but on the result for the team.

For more information, please contact us.