Wessex Training

Creating high performance teams

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Pumping the Colours is a unique team development simulation workshop designed to develop team member's leadership, project management, creativity, co-operation, negotiation, organisation, planning & risk taking skills - attributes of High Performance Teams.

The idea of 'teams' appears to be simple: bring together a group of people, give them a task to do and a team is born. Yet few teams organised in this way become high performing teams. On completion of Pumping the Colours participants are able to:

• Clearly state the type of team they want to be in the future
• Adjust current team behaviours in order to raise performance levels
• Create an open and honest team culture that encourages continuous improvement
• Increase team productivity and improve morale
• Improve their project management skills
• Effectively negotiate the conditions, resources and schedules critical to team success

What happens in Pumping The Colours

In Pumping The Colours teams design and build a complex tri-colour fluid delivery system out of pipes, valves and tubes. This system transports coloured fluid from one end of an eight foot mat to any of twelve targets at the other end. Once teams have built their delivery system on time, to budget and other customer requirements they must then train a complete stranger to operate their system effectively. During the design and build stage teams hold a series of guided self-coaching team meetings to reinforce the disciplines of self correcting behaviour and focused reviews against the core behaviours of High Performance Teams. Teams also learn how to deal with time constraints, risk factors, change and evaluation measurements. They also develop the skills needed to resolve unproductive conflict, manage material and personnel resources, schedule time effectively and negotiate contracts.

Pumping the Colours is a highly flexible simulation and can be run as a ½ day to a two day workshop, separately or in conjunction with other initiatives. The review sessions are customised to focus on the specific development needs of the participants.

Key features

• establishing new teams
• new project teams
• setting team standards
• orientating teams and showing them how to be successful
• continuous improvement
• improving the performance of ineffective teams

What will Pumping the Colours do for my teams?

Help teams confront the pressures, limitations and challenges they are experiencing in the work place. The same problems that are plaguing teams in the work place will plague teams as they try to complete the task. After issues and problems are confronted, teams develop a plan for achieving team success.

Demonstrate that teams must examine and measure both task and process if the team is to improve. Most teams know that progress on the task will be measured. In Pumping the Colours, they discover that they will fail if they don’t also measure team processes.

Help team members understand how their attitudes, values and work styles affect team performance. A variety of team questionnaires and exercises will help team members analyse their impact on the team. Give teams a vocabulary for describing different individual work preferences. When team members don’t have a vocabulary for describing differences, they tend to use pejorative terms.

Give teams the opportunity to practice, take risks and experiment with new behaviours. Because the task is different from their regular work, team members know that if they try a new behaviour and fail, it will not affect job reviews.

Thoroughly involve and engage participants. Pumping the Colours is a challenging task that will help them learn from personal team experience.

Provide an opportunity to celebrate success. The team cheers and celebrates when the colour finally flows. This successful, uplifting spirit can be contagious in the work place.

Who can run Pumping the Colours?

Whilst Pumping the Colours is a team development simulation it is not product which you can buy and run yourself. We have numerous highly skilled, certificated master facilitators that can faciltate Pumping the Colours for you. It can be run separately or in conjunction with other initatives such as your in-house management and development programmes.  

Who will benefit: New and existing teams and team leaders at all levels

Duration: ½ day, 1, 1½ or 2 days

Number of Participants: teams of 6 - 10 participants. Multiple teams can be catered for

Interested?

If you would like to arrange a no obligation meeting, make an enquiry or book Pumping the Colours, please complete a contact us form and one of our consultants will get in touch with you.