With Ivan Hollingsworth, Founder of Centric Consultants
Are you starting to plan your summer team-building retreat or activities?
Trying to find activities that everyone will enjoy can be a minefield, and while it can be tempting to opt for an activity that is just great fun (though that is important) it’s critical to consider how the experience you create links to your business cultural and performance goals for the future.
Effective team building is intrinsically linked to your vision, value, and performance objectives and should make space for people to connect with each other in a really meaningful way. Having a great culture isn’t just about the nice, fun stuff – research shows they go hand in hand with high-performance teams.
Summer team building days are often a rare opportunity to get colleagues together in one place, away from the rush of day-to-day to-do lists, and are a fantastic opportunity to re-establish your company vision, stimulate conversations, and build trust. A traditional team-building activity combined with an interactive session focused on your company values and what those behaviours look like in action can be a powerful catalyst to reaching your business goals and will strengthen the ways that team members can work together when everyone is back to their day job.
By understanding and building a thriving culture you are in turn investing in creating a performance-centric organisation where everyone succeeds together.
At Centric we can work with you to add value to your summer away days and improve the way your team connects and works together while making sure everyone still has a brilliant time. That doesn’t mean skipping the fun activity, which is still important, it’s just about reframing how you bring in your values to the day and use the experience to build connection or trust within your team.
Corporate Rebels
by Joost Minnaar
If you’re looking for a quick and easy read on what great thinkers and organisations are doing when it comes to company culture, this is the book for you. Corporate Rebels shares 8 radical lessons from 100 of the world’s most inspiring companies and gives direct evidence that you can make work enjoyable and rewarding while boosting performance and success.
Reinventing Organisations
by Frederic Laloux and Ken Wilber
This is a great accompanying read to Corporate Rebels examining human evolution, how we have developed to form groups, and what that means in the workplace. In this in-depth book, the authors discuss how the management of organizations seems increasingly out of date and why the problem goes much further than people leaving sectors like education and healthcare in increasingly high volumes. This book looks at how businesses can tackle power games at the top, powerlessness at lower levels, infighting, bureaucracy, and the trend of seemingly endless meetings, change, and cost-cutting programs.
Ivan Hollingsworth is the founder and director of Centric Consultants – a business founded in a bid to tackle ‘culture-washing’ and support business leaders to build strong, sustainable, high-performing teams based on trust and psychological safety. For more insights on what company culture truly means, and how to can implement change across your business follow Centric Consultants on LinkedIn or email Ivan directly at ivan@centric-consultants.com