Glasstap will be 17 in April and it’s nearly 14 years since we launched Trainers’ Library. I often wonder where the time goes!
If you were to ask me what one thing has contributed most to our longevity and success, I’d say teamwork. And what makes our team so successful is its diversity. From our earliest days when I wrote the training activities, and Craig Worcester developed the systems and websites, we’ve relied on our diverse skills to progress.
A good example of how our team works effectively together these days is our latest training activity, An Alien Challenge. It’s the type of training activity I most love – fun, engaging and powerful.
An Alien Challenge is all about questioning skills – the ability to choose the most powerful questions and to use both open and closed questions effectively to gather and clarify information.
The inspiration for the exercise came from a Glasstap Learning Experience Day I facilitated for one our customers. I discussed the idea with my colleague Frances, who gave it a new Alien twist and a fun back story. She invented different team briefs that would highlight the learning points and wrote the comprehensive trainer’s notes. I reviewed the new exercise and Louise, who’s a stickler for detail, proofread and checked everything. Louis (not to be mistaken for Louise) used his impressive artistic skills to give the new module a real wow factor; so important in terms of making the learning experience truly memorable. The whole team tested the activity, after which it was refined and checked again.
Teams thrive on their differences; not their similarities, and we’re lucky to have within our small, but perfectly formed team, a broad range of both skills and things we love doing. Louis and Lee have even combined their artistic and IT skills with our training design skills to bring the creation of animated videos in-house, which means we can add more of these than ever before this year.
You might, by now, have realised that I’m incredibly proud of all my team has achieved and is capable of. But how did we come to have such a broad range of abilities within our team? You might call it serendipity, since many people’s roles have evolved considerably over time, and expanded way beyond the original job description. Or you might say we’ve been very, very good at discovering hidden talents and giving people the space to use them.
What talents might you have in your organisation that are currently not being fully utilised at work?
Help the organisations you work with unleash their latent talent and open a whole universe of new opportunities. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Get in touch, or leave a comment below.
Rod Webb
