Developing the skills and confidence of individuals and teams to do anything better takes careful planning. This kind of work is often done in a cursory fashion because a box called staff development needs ticking, but unless it is properly designed around relevant needs, aims and learning outcomes training is rarely successful.

Development of skills, knowledge and confidence can be done through the processes of coaching, training and the facilitation of groups who want to work together better, or plan how they will move forward.

Determining what development work is relevant for individuals, teams and the project/service they are involved in can be done in various ways, but the common thread running through them all is listening to what is needed. Listening to the needs of your clients or customers, your staff and yourself provides an opportunity to gather all the necessary information to make improvements.

Once the relevant needs are known work can begin on designing the aim and the learning outcomes of the event that is planned. The aim tells you what you want to achieve by carrying out the process. The learning outcomes cover the opportunities the participants will have during the event to reach the stated aim.

The methodological content of the event will then be developed depending on several factors, for example: the field you work in, who the participants are, and the learning outcomes, the timing and the duration of the event. The vast majority of the work I will do involves participative and experiential methods of learning. In other words, people get to join in and do things, and in the process they will learn something.

 

Training

As described above the process of training begins with determining the needs of clients or customers and then deciding what skills, knowledge and confidence are required by staff (or volunteers) serving them to fulfill those needs.

Good training therefore looks at where staff are now in this context and is designed to move them forward to a desired end point where they will have increased skills, knowledge and confidence in the chosen topic.

In the case of an individual needing training, coaching tends to be the term used for one-to-one tutoring, but the process follows the same principles.

To discuss how training could benefit you, your staff or volunteers, your organisation and its clients or customers please contact me.

To read more about the type of training I can offer please have a look here (or click on Training here or above).

 

Group facilitation

Sometimes groups of people working together - usually in teams, but not always - need to get better at the way that they do things together. They don't necessarily need training in any particular topic or process, but maybe want to change how they communicate with each other, or re-establish enthusiasm for working together on a shared goal, or maybe work out what that goal might be in the first place.

To see why such groups may want to use a facilitator go here.

This type of development work is often called team-building, but this can be misleading as not all groups of people are teams or see themselves as such. Team-building puts a lot of people off anyway - as they often envisage having to do role playing, or see it as a way of diverting attention away from organisational process issues onto the individuals in the team. So I like to see making the improvement of the  communication between the individuals at the event the main focus - if they are a team they will be a closer one by the end of the process anyway.

 

Consultancy

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Copyright © 2007 Tim Street Training and Consultancy Services
Last modified: 10/04/07