Wouldn’t it be great if you had access to training activities that weren’t focused on just ‘teaching’ one behaviour? That allowed you to observe real behaviours rather than those that participants are ‘putting on’ for your benefit? Wouldn’t it be great if you could set challenges that made participants forget they were in a training room? Or which gave participants the opportunity to recognise their own strengths and develop their own plans for improving future performance?
Well, if you’re a
Trainers’ Library member, you do, particularly with our range of Team Building games. They are some of my favourite activities to create and deliver, and I was really pleased that our most recent Discovery Day gave me an opportunity to test my new team building game,
His Lordship’s Garden Party with a lovely group of trainers.*
Our team building games always include an element of fun, as well as a team challenge. This is important because, and this is something I like to spend time on in my
Creative Training Essentials course, our brains are designed to remember the unusual and the stuff that evokes an emotional reaction. I often meet people who, sometimes ten years or more after a training event, still talk about
Murder at Glasstap Grange, or
Jack Fruggle’s Treasure and really, how often do people typically remember training for a week, yet alone years?
His Lordship’s Garden Party introduces the particularly eccentric Lord Pockington Smythe-Brookshield, who has given his butler Ida Spare something of a headache – organising a garden party with an hour’s notice! It’s likely to be a challenge people remember.
Retention is just the first step to achieving a change back in the workplace though.
The second is Inspiration. This means the learning has to be relevant. Whilst fun, our team building games test real-world behaviours. His Lordship’s Garden Party, for example, tests participants’ and teams’ abilities to organise themselves, allocate roles, manage time, set stretching but achievable goals, and manage unforeseen challenges. In this game you win points for delivering great results, but you also lose points for over promising and under delivering.
If you’re already a Trainers’ Library member, I hope both you and your participants enjoy His Lordship’s Garden Party, but more than anything I hope that your participants remember it, are able to identify strengths and weaknesses from it, and are inspired to make changes as a result of the experience. Because, ultimately, that’s what all training should be about – delivering change back in the workplace.
If you’re not yet a member, hopefully this, along with all the other new materials being added to
Trainers’ Library, provides another reason to join!
I’d love to hear how you get on with this new activity and please do email me with any feedback, or if you have any questions at
[email protected].
Of course, members can also review any of our training materials by clicking on ‘show/hide reviews’ and ‘add a review’. And your reviews can really help other trainers.
Until next time…
*Our Discovery Days are a fantastic opportunity to trial training sessions that will give other trainers tools and ideas to use, and if you’d like to run a practical session at any of our forthcoming events, please let me know.