Why do team challenges work?

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Recently I was hiking on a granite dome, and after exploring a bit at the top, found myself challenged with finding a navigable route back down. In essence, I was “lost” on the dome, climbing up and down steep slopes for a couple of hours, occasionally getting stuck and frequently wondering whether I’d ever make it down in one piece. At times I thought it was either going to take a rescue or a fall to get me off that mountain. But I kept at it, and after much scrambling, climbing, sliding, and scooting along the rocks, I successfully made it to a trail, and then back to camp (just in time for dinner).

The experience got me thinteam challengesking about team challenges and what makes them so effective. A typical workplace team is rarely tested in the normal work environment. Team members perform their duties, handle responsibilities, and complete tasks routinely, but usually without ever knowing what they are truly capable of. And because of this, they don’t necessarily stretch themselves to try to do more, and team potential remains untapped.

A well-designed challenge activity will take team members outside of their comfort zones (but not too far!). It allows them to step out of their normal work environment and into one that propels them to learn more about themselves individually and as a team. Those lessons can then be applied back in the workplace. For example, team members may recognize something about the way they communicate (or don’t) that influenced their ability to be successful in a challenge. Or, they may have found that it was necessary to rely on the diverse strengths of all team members in order to achieve a goal.

Often self-confidence increases through participation in challenge activities. Participants may recognize that: “If I could do that, then I can most certainly do this!”  In my own dome-climbing adventure, I had to rely on strengths that I didn’t even know I had, until they were tested on the mountain.

I also came to understand things at a deeper level that I had already known. For example, the importance of planning, and thinking ahead further than the next step or two. And how failure to look at the goal from a big-picture perspective can lead to dead-ends or jams that are really hard to get out of. Additionally, I had to recognize when something was beyond my skill.  Just because I wanted and was willing to climb up a certain slope didn’t mean that I necessarily had the size or physical strength to do so. These are similar to the types of things that team members may learn during challenge activities.

Every team and every challenge activity experience is unique. What insights will your team have that will drive them to peak performance?

How does your team make decisions?

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Think about the last time you made a decision as part of a group. How did it go? Do you think the decision was a good one, one that will result in the desired outcome? Are you satisfied with the way the decision was made?  Do you feel that all viable options were given appropriate consideration?

Whether it’s your family trying to decide which ride to go on first at Disneyland, or your organization deciding on a launch strategy for a new product, you’re likely to encounter similar challenges. When you’re part of a group and you need to make decision, how do you do it? Do you follow a set process, or is it different every time? Do a few people (or maybe just one specific person) always take the lead in making the decision? Or does everyone get a voice?

When team decision-making works, it can propel a team to remarkable levels of achievement. The team will act quickly, confidently, and effectively to accomplish tasks, find solutions, and generate new ideas. Unfortunately, when decision-making doesn’t work effectively, it can create enormous obstacles.  Team members who have no voice in a decision may lack commitment to achieving the goal. Delays become the norm, concerns are not brought to light, and small issues may turn into big problems.

It’s not just the big decisions that trip people up. Every day, team members make dozens of decisions, whether individually or collectively. When the decision-making process is dysfunctional, so is the performance of the group. So what can you do to ensure that your team is working together effectively as it makes those large and small decisions each day?

Team decision-makingExperiential learning activities can be a great way to help a team discover and improve its group process for decision-making. In their book Teamwork & Teamplay, Jim Cain and Barry Joliff offer an activity called 2B or Knot 2B. In this activity, participants need to decide, as a group, which one of several ropes is holding all the others together. Through the activity and debriefing discussion, participants gain awareness of how they interact with each other when making decisions, and learn how their actions either moved the group forward or hindered its success in solving the problem. This type of discussion becomes a springboard for change as the team works to develop new and more effective ways to interact.

Back to the question I asked at the beginning of this post – how did it go the last time you made a decision as part of a group? Would you like to improve on that experience? If so, perhaps experiential learning techniques can help!

Why it’s good to stumble now and then

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I stumbled while running the other day.  Fell, actually.  Pretty much flat-out.  I’m happy to report that I did get up, and, after taking a quick inventory of scrapes and what would soon be bruises, kept on going.  Just like we do in life, right?  Later, I analyzed what had happened.  Why did I fall?  Because I had my eyes on something I Achieve goals runningwas trying to reach up ahead and neglected to also pay attention to the (uneven) ground right in front of me.

This is very much like working to achieve goals in work, school, and life.  While we need to keep our eyes on the end-goal, the ultimate prize, we also need to attend to those things right in front of us.  If we don’t, we might find ourselves stumbling so often that we never reach the goal.  On the flip side, there is a risk in focusing too much on the minutia where it’s easy to get side-tracked or otherwise entangled in obstacles.

If we stumble now and then, is that such a bad thing?  What if we never challenge ourselves enough to risk failing? If we stumble on our way to the goal, might it mean that we are growing and stretching our capabilities?  Too much caution could bog us down, keeping us from moving forward at all.  So balance is important, moving forward, but with purpose and focus on many levels.

And what if attention to detail just isn’t your strength?  Or goal-setting is a challenge?  These may be good opportunities for collaboration, perhaps developing a team of people that have many and varied strengths to offer.  A team of this sort also offers support of another kind, as members hold each other up while all are learning and building new skills.

What strategies have you used in the past to balance between the end goal and the specific steps to get there?  What new ideas do you think you could try tomorrow?

 

Learning transfer – why should you care?

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Perhaps you are the person in your organization responsible for making sure everyone learns a critical new procedure. Everyone attends a full-day training. The training event gets great reviews in the follow-up surveys, and the participants earn high scores on tests given at the end of the session.  But when the participants get back on the job, they have trouble applying what they learned and don’t follow the new procedure. What happened? Or rather, didn’t happen? Learning transfer. And when learning transfer doesn’t happen, it’s costly. Not only because the new procedure isn’t used properly (or at all), but also because of all the costs that go into training, and potentially re-training members of the organization.

What is learning transfer? It’s the ability of learners to apply what they learned in the “classroom” to their real-world environment. If you are familiar with the Kirkpatrick Model of training evaluation, you might think of this as Level 3, measuring how well learners apply what they’ve learned. The good news is that it’s possible to design instruction in a way that promotes learning transfer. Recent research about how our brains learn has found remarkable things with direct application to the learning environment. Instruction designed with a focus on these concepts is far more likely to result in learning transfer.

Learning transfer

Here’s an example. Research shows that our brains are constantly seeking new and interesting stimuli and there are limits to the amount of time we can successfully stay focused on one particular task (Sousa, 2011). This means that in a learning setting, our minds will begin to wander, looking for novelty if the instruction does not provide it. So when an instructor stands in front of a group lecturing for an hour, what do you think happens? Most listeners probably check out after the first 10-15 minutes, thinking about all kinds of things that are most likely not related to the instruction. John Medina (2008) refers to this as the 10-minute rule and designs his lectures around this concept, introducing something to refocus interest right before each 10-minute mark.

How do we ensure that training-time is time well-spent?   That participants come away from training able to apply what they’ve learned? That the same training doesn’t have to be re-administered a few months down the road because it hasn’t been applied?

The key is to consider learning transfer when designing every aspect of instruction: the learning environment, the format. the content, and everything else. In this way, the resources spent on developing, implementing, and participating in training result in the maximum benefit to the organization and its people.

 

References:

McGinty, J., Radin, J., & Kaminski, K. (2013). Brain-friendly teaching supports learning transfer. In L. M. Kaiser, K. Kaminski, & J. M. Foley (Eds.), New directions for adult and continuing education: Learning transfer in adult education, pp. 49-59). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Medina, J. J. (2008). Brain rules: 12 principles for surviving and thriving at work, home, and school. [Kindle]. Retrieved from eISBN: 978-0-979=77778-3

Sousa, D. A. (2011). How the brain learns (4th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.