Investing your staff by teaching them new techniques and tools is a wise choice. However, your company will reap even more rewards from team leadership training, in which members of a work group are instructed alongside one another. To paraphrase Peter Senge, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and author of The Fifth Discipline: “Team learning is crucial because teams, not people, constitute the primary learning unit in contemporary businesses.”
The Advantages of Teamwork Practices
Training workers in groups where they can share knowledge and ideas effectively increases the returns on the investment in skilling up the workforce. Here are five reasons why your workers should participate in team training.
Collaborative work skills are developed via team training.
The internal organization of your team works well with tried-and-true methods of boosting knowledge retention. Emeritus’ online courses employ a teaching method called “cohort-based learning,” which groups students. Classes no longer consist of students passively observing a lecturer and working alone on assignments. This kind of teaching, which allows all students to go at the same speed through the curriculum, gained popularity in the 1990s when it was found that students might inspire one another, leading to higher course completion and retention rates.
Learning in a cohort setting naturally involves doing things, and new research from Harvard University found that students retain more information by doing than by listening to lectures. Cooperative learning allows students to build social capital and interpersonal networks, which may enhance their academic performance.
Participation in team activities is boosted through training.
After participating actively in training as a team, members can immediately put their newfound skills to use in their jobs. Employees fully engaged in their work are invested emotionally and intellectually in the company’s success. Employees that are invested in their job not only provide higher quality output but also show reduced churn, which is good for retention.
Teams that have received training have shown considerable improvements in their ability to work together.
Teams may benefit from training in a technical field (like data analytics or blockchain) by practicing “soft skills” like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, problem-solving, and adaptability. Staff members who go through the training together share experiences and develop mental models for assessing and applying methodologies and ideas to projects work better together after that. A trainer who oversees a group while they solve an issue together also provides a fresh perspective on how the group might improve its performance. The results of your team’s effort will benefit from this.