NQ Dry Tropics team resilience, EQ, mindfulness, self-care
NQ Dry Tropics (2019 to current) – we ran an 18-month wellbeing and team connection program for all 40 team members. This included a series of quarterly half-day workshops delivered through a mixture of face-to-face and online workshops. Modules included: emotional self-management, mindfulness at work, understanding individual and organisational values, building a strengths-based culture, time management and organisation, self-compassion coaching, empathy training, giving and receiving feedback, decision making and heuristic bias.
We are now working with the senior management team using the strengths-profile coaching tool and continuing one-to-one coaching with the broader team.
AIMS (2016 program plus wellbeing workshops to 2022) – participants from the Women at AIMS group completed our emotional agility at work program. This included online MSCEIT psychometric assessments, one-to-one coaching, plus two day-long emotional agility workshops.
The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) is a world leader in tropical marine research, expanding the nation’s knowledge hidden below the surface. It has a team of over 400 experts based in Townsville and Perth.
The leadership program at AIMS was tasked with equipping participants with skills to understand their own current emotional intelligence abilities and explore techniques to develop their abilities. In addition, AIMS require their teams to be able to connect and communicate effectively. Therefore, they saw emotional intelligence training as a valuable addition to their existing leadership offerings and as supporting their framework of psychosocially healthy workplaces.
The program had to be robust, evidenced-based and engaging for a team of highly specialised and educated workforce.
PwC in North Queensland
The local partners of PwC in North Queensland wanted to introduce their small team of 40 people to new training concepts. So we developed a program called Thrive at work. Each month, over twelve months, we delivered one-hour workshops on a Friday morning to the whole team. The training topics included:
- How to be in flow at work – understanding when to allow colleagues focus time and when is best for collaboration time
- Emotional intelligence at work – exploring techniques for developing greater self-awareness at work and new healthy workplace behaviours
- Embedding mindfulness into work
- Handling data deluge – techniques to store and organise information
- Applied positive psychology – creating psychological safety at work
- Effective communication – understanding the impact of heuristic biases on collaboration and effectiveness
After the program was completed, PwC sold the business to its local partners. And we were asked to create a new program to help the team transition from being part of a multinational finance firm to a local niche provider.
Amerada Hess in the UK
Amerada Hess is an international oil firm. We were asked to work with two of the organisations teams in London.
The first was a geology team. The team wanted to understand how to use meditation to help improve the quality of decision-making. As with many teams dealing with complex data, geology teams can be susceptible to confirmation bias. For example, suppose a senior leader in the team concludes that a particular rock formation could be valuable to explore. In that case, there may be an impulse to search for evidence which confirms that view. Hess wanted to understand whether other approaches complement existing procedures to mitigate heuristic biases in decision-making and asked me to create a meditation program for the team to help them pause and reflect before jumping to conclusions.
The second program was a one-day workshop with the global HR team of Hess. The remit was to explore the VIA (values in action strengths) tool to:
- Understand their own and each other’s values better
- Individual, team and organisational value alignment or misalignment
- Application of a strengths-based approach to the opportunities and challenges faced by the team
HAYS Recruitment
We have run multiple team connection sessions for HAYS Recruitment in North Queensland. One of the programs was to equip the leaders of each of their North Queensland offices with emotional agility tools to help them:
- Lead their teams
- Create psychologically safe places for their teams to flourish
- Create a strengths-based feedback culture in their teams
- Integrate a strengths-based approach into client interactions
