In team building, R is for.... ?

... Raising the Baa of course!

And indeed we aim to raise the 'baa' in every aspect of teamwork.

In this episode we cover R themes which:
- improve productivity
- make optimum use of resources
- help move the team towards its goals effectively
- lift people's levels of engagement

This series, The A-Z of Team Building, was inspired by the many lessons learned by our clients following their experience of Raising the Baa. And we punctuate it with a few insights of our own too.

Expect plenty of analogies from the world of sheep and dogs from Head Shepherd & Founder of Raising the Baa, Chris Farnsworth, in these short and lively conversations with Paul Warriner, Associate Facilitator.

Enjoy - and thank ewe for listening :-)

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COMPETITION TIME!
In the November draw, the prize is a portable Bluetooth Speaker, perfect for podcasts and all other listening of course!

To enter simply answer this question:

Which R topic can really lift a team's energy and have a profound effect on its morale and productivity?

Email your response to baa@raisingthebaa.com, with Sheep Dip in the subject box please.

The November draw closes at 23.59 on 30 November 2024 and we'll email the winners the following working day.  One entry per episode. Open to UK residents only.

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FREE resource:
Sheep, Shepherd or Dog - which one are ewe? Take our personality quiz and find out.

Connect with the Speakers via LinkedIn:
Paul Warriner - The Recognition Coach and Associate Facilitator, Raising the Baa
Chris Farnsworth - Head Shepherd and Co-Founder, Raising the Baa

What are your main team challenges and desires? Maybe we can help?
Book in a 15-minute Exploratory Call now and let's see.

Transcript

Caroline (00:03):

Hello and welcome to Sheep Dip, the podcast from Raising the Baa. We're global leaders in team building with sheep at its core. I'm Caroline, and together with my partner Chris, we co-founded this completely unique business. In this series of podcasts, we are bringing you the complete A to Z of team building. It picks up on all the themes that have been fed back to us by our clients in their reviewing sessions, following their Raising the Baa programmes, and a few more topics of our own too. Expect plenty of shepherding references from Chris and he is in lively conversations with Paul Warriner our lead facilitator. In this series, at the end of each episode, we are going to ask you a question. It'll be related to something discussed in the show. Keep your answers handy because each and every month we're giving away some Raising the Baa prizes. So whenever you're listening, you can enter. How to enter will be in the show notes. Enjoy the show.

Chris (01:03):

Hi Paul, how are things?

Paul (01:05):

Great, thanks Chris. And yourself?

Chris (01:07):

Oh, just good as ever. We're onto R ..... for me, it's got to be about reviewing. This is the time of year we review where we are. In the autumn we're going to review how last year went and we're going to set the budgets and go for next year. What's in the team building world?

Paul (01:29):

Well, if you pick the word review, I think it's a vital part of the process of being in a team, building a team, delivering on a, you know, a goal and a project. Where are you? Where'd you stand? Exactly the same words you've just said. Review how it's gone, how it went, how was this week, how was last week? How do we measure up? What have we still got to do? And so review can lead into tweaking and planning, changing things slightly because they've not quite gone according to plan, but a lot of the time people don't review and they just plough on. They can end up in completely the wrong place with the wrong result. Oh, there's another one. But we'll come back to that.

Chris (02:16):

Thing is, in my world we have a definite time of the year we review. Every 12 months in effect, and we will definitely review how we do. We don't review generally. I mean, we sometimes review after lambing to go, oh good, I've got this many lambs. But really the reviewing session is done in the autumn because that's our natural time to do it. Is there a natural time to review your progress with the team?

Paul (02:45):

That's an excellent question, depends on the objectives and what the activities are going to be, but if you, let's just say that the launch of a project, how did it go? There's no point reviewing the launch of the project at the end of the project. If you don't review the launch kickoff as they call it, if you don't review that within a relatively short space of time, following on from that, you don't really know how it's landed. You don't know what the feedback's going to be, it sets the tone for the rest of the project potentially. And if that tone hasn't struck a chord with people, hasn't quite landed, people aren't getting it, whatever it is that's important to review and it takes a lot of courage to come back from what was a plan to review that plan and to say it's not working.

(03:43)
We see this all the time in politics with U-turns and this, that, and the other. You see it in a lot of sport where teams are trying a particular tactic and it's not working, so they adjust, they're playing heads up games or whatever that's going to be for whatever sport they're in. If you've got a marketplace that's particularly challenging, you need to review all the time. And it's that analysis really that saying of you aim, you fire, you see where you've hit, you make minor adjustments and you go again. So you have a sighting shot and then you hone in on the target more and more as you progress through instead of just firing aimlessly. So for me, reviewing is there's no wrong time.

Chris (04:28):

Yeah.

Paul (04:28):

We could review immediately afterwards. In fact, that's what you really do. You do debrief, whether it's in the pub afterwards or in the boardroom afterwards or in the middle of an opportune break. How do you think that went? Oh, you know, I don't think they got it. We need to try harder. And I think that's one of the key things people need to be able to recognise that often people need to hear a message more than once, twice. Repetition, that's a good one that brings us into another R. So that repetition of message, that repetition of, of statement, of intent, of target, of goal of vision needs to be there all the time. Otherwise people wander off and they don't quite buy into it.

Chris (05:22):

But it's not just repetition, is it? It's a repetition of wanting to get better. And that to me is actually, I mean I think of shearing because it is repetitious, but actually it's the wanting to get better. Even the odd second makes a big difference at the end of the day. You know, when you're shearing 200 sheep, 200 seconds is quite a long period of time. It's just one second. And so everything is about repetition to make things easier, to recognise that, oh, there's another one. Recognition of somebody doing a good job. Even the person, you know, loading the pen or taking the wool away it is a real team effort. And giving recognition is really important, wouldn't you say?

Paul (06:10):

I most certainly would. Actually, we see celebration of success when they've achieved the goal. But recognition of a good job well done in the moment, at any particular stage? I'm just casting my mind back. You don't have people going, great job. I love the way you just held your arms out there. Don't necessarily see that a lot. I don't know if you've got any experience of that, but in the moment, not just at the end, but during the course of the day, during the course of a particular exercise, do you see that recognition and celebration of a great job well done?

Chris (06:52):

It depends on the team. And what you do notice is when it's genuine recognition, I mean, it's not just going, oh, well done, you let them all go past you.

Paul (07:01):

That's another form of recognition.

Chris (07:02):

But when you see people giving genuine recognition of a job, the thing is, a lot of people go, oh, run, don't run the sheep move. If you run after them, they run even faster. And so it's this ability to do like a little shuffle to turn them around, to go in the right direction and it needs to be quite quick. And people don't really recognise that. And the recognition, if you do recognise it and do verbalise it and praise something, it lifts the energy of the whole group around you. And that is to strive for a better result. So this recognition is sometimes uncomfortable if it is not genuine. But actually, if it's given genuinely, then actually what happens is it lifts the spirit of the team. I think that's the number one thing which will lift the energy, lift the resolve of getting to the target, if you like.

Paul (08:08):

But you're right, that recognition, individual, both individual and team, doesn't have to be given by a team leader, could be given by your colleague, a person standing next to you. It does lift the energy and it does put a bounce in people's steps. So that does lead to a better performance and ultimately gets you towards the results that you want.

Caroline (08:32):

If you're enjoying listening to this podcast, we'd really appreciate your following us and rating Sheep Dip wherever it is that you tune in. And if you've got a burning question arising from today's show or you have a topic that you'd like to discuss in a bit more detail, then please email me. Caroline@raisingthebaa.com.

Paul (08:54):

Let's talk about results. Often teams are measured by results. And in many sporting arenas, the results are really what matters. Get paid for the positions you're finishing, for the wins. But there are many measures of result and some we don't see. It's a result just to turn up sometimes. It's a result just to get onto the pitch. Many parents with their children playing football, rugby, hockey, tennis, they just want them to participate. That's a result. Results are measured in so many different ways, but often we don't see what the game is. We can see a potential game, but there are many little plots, subplots going on. So somebody who's really not that confident participating in one of our exercises, it's a fantastic result just to get them out there in the field, collaborating with their colleagues, enjoying it. That's a magnificent result, on a personal level, on a team level, however you want to measure that.

(10:00)
But if they didn't get the sheep in the pen, you would say it wasn't a good day. But at different levels of that day, people are experiencing sometimes life changing results. We've had people who are scared of sheep, people who have never been in the countryside, people who have not really met other team members, and yet they're chatting away during the course. That's a result. So results can be very different. And I think we look all too quickly at the end game and not really take stock of all the many results that we get along the way, which builds people's confidence, self-esteem, their contribution, et cetera. So results for me is a powerful, very emotive word.

Chris (10:41):

But surely the reflectiveness of the task is actually where the nugget is, isn't it? Is that what you're saying? It's not actually getting the sheep in the pen, it's actually all the steps along the way are where that reflectiveness causes you to find the gold nuggets. Does that make sense to you?

Paul (11:01):

Yeah, it definitely does. And if you don't review, if you don't reflect, you don't get a chance to celebrate and you don't get the recognition because it's just skirted over because the end game wasn't hit. But those people who are aware and are intuitively responding to people around them, that's when that review and that reflection comes in. And it's a really powerful tool, as I said, just getting them out into the field. If you know that somebody's never been there and scared and really lacks the confidence to participate and they do, we should be celebrating that.

Chris (11:37):

The roles and responsibilities of people where they actually know what they're doing gives them confidence and helps the team know the parameters. Would that be a key factor, do you think?

Paul (11:50):

It's enormous. You really do need to have an idea of what you are doing, where your effort is going to go. And that could be at the very start. If you don't have any clue as to where you're standing in the field, in the exercise or the job you're doing within a team, you can wander and totally be unproductive. And people might see that in many different ways. They might think you're lazy, they might think you've been avoiding them. You might have all sorts of interpretations of that. But if you're not given a clear guideline as to what you need to be doing, then that can often happen. In the exercises we do, everybody has a part to play, but often people don't understand what that part is and they don't understand how important it is to be connected to the next person in the process. But I've seen it work wonderfully well where everybody is given a job to do and everybody has a task and everybody plays that part, and it really works well. I've also seen it when the exercise we do in the field is just chaos.

Chris (12:54):

Yeah, that's very true. I mean, we've seen some right, chaos happen.

Paul (12:58):

And you can learn from that chaos. And the teams do, I think without a shadow of a doubt, they learn from that because they get the guidance. They have the feedback from us. And they often don't need the feedback from us, but we just consolidate that feedback and point them in the right direction and help them make up new plans and stuff. But you know, that chaos is actually quite helpful because we've seen teams succeed and then disintegrate into chaos and come back from that too. And I think that's all part of the review or part of that character building process that goes on within Raising the Baa activities

Chris (13:35):

Ooh we've had a right ramble.

Paul (13:37):

The letter R.....

Chris (13:41):

On that point, we'd better go. We'll see you next time.

Paul (13:45):

Hopefully. Bye bye.

Chris (13:46):

Bye.

Caroline (13:48):

Well, I hope you've enjoyed the show. Thank you so much for listening. Did you get the answer to the question? Keep it handy because at the end of each calendar month, we will be doing a draw of all the correct entries. Full details of how to enter are in the show notes. Till next time, have a baa-rilliant week. Bye.