TMP were approached by the management team of a fast paced call centre to support them with a team building intervention to help aid more productive and cooperative working. While some members of the team had been in place for over 12 months others had joined more recently and had yet to forge strong working relationships with their colleagues. In addition, this management team were responsible for the set up of a brand new call centre operation which meant
The Solution
The TMP Assessment Services team first met with the manager of this team to understand the issues and challenges the team had faced to date in their time within the organisation as well as some of the challenges that lay ahead.
The two key objectives for the team building session were identified as:
- To get to know each other better to facilitate working relationships
- To be able to communicate with each other effectively
Later, during the workshop the team would also identify the following objectives:
- To gain understanding of how to adapt their communication style to suit the audience
- To understand how others might interpret their behaviour
- To know how to get the best out of each other
- To understand what natural preferences/strengths they were missing as a team
- To have some fun!
It was agreed that the intervention would consist of 1:1 feedback sessions between each individual team member and a TMP consultant and one half day workshop for the entire team facilitated by two of TMP’s consultants.
As practitioners of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) TMP recognised that this tool would be an ideal springboard from which to launch this team building intervention. The MBTI is the most widely used personality questionnaire in the world with more than 3.5 million questionnaires completed worldwide every year. Based on over 50 years of research, the MBTI offers individuals and teams insight into personality preferences in order to better understand, relate to and communicate in personal and work settings.
All team members were emailed an invitation to complete an online MBTI questionnaire. Once completed, we held a one hour discussion with each individual to feed back the outputs of the MBTI. These sessions set out to uncover each team member’s “best fit” MBTI type – the type they felt best described their true self. Once all individual feedbacks were complete TMP set about finalising the design of the workshop around the team’s MBTI Team Type with exercises specifically selected to best elicit reflections and learnings amongst this team team.
The workshop covered:
- Introduction to MBTI Types: overview of the MBTI preference pairs
- Exploration of Type: four different exercises selected to demonstrate the differences and similarities in the different MBTI types represented within the team
- Reflections: time for the team to reflect on the insights they have gained and what they have learnt about themselves and others in the team
- Actions: collation of actions and outputs to ensure learnings are put into place once back in the workplace
Critical to the success of this workshop was the sharing of personal anecdotes by delegates and the TMP facilitators that illustrated the personality difference between themselves and colleagues in line with the difference MBTI types.
The Result
The feedback from the delegates was extremely positive with 100% of delegates stating this workshop represented value for their time and 100% saying they would recommend the workshop to their colleagues.
As well as them finding that the MBTI provided them with a useful, non confrontational language with which to address team differences and less effective working this group said that they gained value in following ways:
“…helped me gain a better understanding of my
own behaviour and how this can impact on others.”
“…good to understand how certain groups react
under pressure or stress.”
“…helped me recognise the value of other types.”
For more information about TMP Assessment Services and our work please contact Claire Parkin on claire.parkin@tmpw.co.uk or 020 7268 9010.