What makes Cooking Up Collaboration so effective?
Cooking Up Collaboration is truly a team building program, not a cooking class. We use cooking together as a metaphor to teach lessons on leadership, reliance on others creativity as well as your own, time management, delegation and many other issues that face teams. In fact, we give no instructions about how to cook, other than how to turn on the equipment.
Behavioral Assessments
We recommend using a behavioral assessment such as Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the DiSC™ or the Kolbe A™ Index to gain insight into the way your teams currently function and see themselves. Administered online prior to the event, these assessments focus on the team's behavior and provide a baseline against which to measure improvement. They measure the degree of trust among team members and how well they manage conflict. Team members are given information that can help them to adapt behaviors that increase team accountability and results.
The assessment coupled with the event gives team members immediate feedback at how their behavior plays out on a team and adds great depth to the learning.
The Debrief Session
The critical part of our program is the debrief session where participants are asked
What were the the strengths you displayed?
How will what you learned here make you a better team member? a better leader?
What will be your challenges bringing about change in your organization?
The activity presents real world challenges like resource managment, planning, organization and onboarding of new team members.We conclude the debrief by linking the activity to similar situations in the workplace and how the lessons learned apply.
All of this makes Cooking Up Collaboration a great tool for companies, non profits, organizations, even families for evaluating the degree to which their teams function and where they need to step up their efforts and improve outcomes.