Wednesday, 20th September 2017

This event explored the popular topic of team development and our two speakers brought us a slightly different take on working to improve the effectiveness of teams as a way of enriching and deepening our understanding of how people interact.

Ben Thornton

Alan Robertson

Business Psychologist, Director at Business Cognition Ltd.

Alan established Alan Robertson Associates in 1992 after working in various operational, strategic and board-level managerial roles. He is a founder member of the Special Group in Coaching Psychology for the BPS and is a Senior Visiting Teaching Fellow at the Cass Business School and in the School of Applied Sciences at Cranfield University.  He spent years taking part in industrial negotations and mediations and developed VoicePrint diagnostic tool as a way of enabling individuals and teams to improve the quality of their communication and interactions by creating in-the-moment awareness and skills in the use of talk.  See the VoicePrint website for more information.

The subject of Alan’s talk was ‘Voiceprint: How the Way We Talk Shapes How We Think and Act’.

Ben Thornton

Roy Childs

Chartered Occupational Psychologist and Managing Director of Team Focus

Roy is currently a Consultant Editor for the BPS Test Review process and an Occupational Test Verifier. He has contributed to the development of the BPS process for training and qualifying people and has served as a member of the Standing Committee on Test Standards and the Division of Occupational Psychology committee. He has various publications, the latest of which is a book called ‘The Relational Lens’ (2016) but also includes ‘MTRi and Type Mapping for Team Coaching’ and ‘Coaching with FIRO Element B’.  Roy spoke about ‘The Dark Matter in Organisations: Recognising, Understanding and Working Through Relational Aspects of Teams’.  He addressed why the relational aspects of teams is often ignored and described ways to understand teams that creates a wider variety of interventions. Some of these interventions can focus on relationships directly; others can approach the issue through personality, role or situational lenses. The result is a far more flexible and useful framework for building successful teams. It also leads to practical ways of helping teams to change and develop.