How we’re supercharging our team at Torchbox
We want our team to lead and inspire each other, to be resilient, to reach our full potential and ultimately to be happy in our work, so we are investing in soft skills training and leadership coaching.
We wanted a training programme that would help our team to develop the oft-neglected, soft skills that are critical to good leadership, and that would give each of them the confidence to grow as leaders.
Olly Willans, Creative Director, Torchbox
What we’ve learned so far: We’ve become masters of conflict resolution, we’ve learnt new skills to build stronger relationships and we’re currently learning how to lead and influence. Still to come, we’ll be learning how to perfect facilitation and storytelling, and finally how to optimise our outbound communications.
I’ve found one of the most insightful learnings has been on understanding different communications styles.
The different styles tend to focus on either:
- the here and now vs the future
- solving problems vs building relationships
We all took part in a quiz to discover what our most dominant communication style is. I discovered that I’m a socialiser, closely followed by relater, which I think is pretty accurate. So I need to think more carefully about my behaviour when engaging with an opposite style such as a Thinker or Director in order that we both get the most out of the interaction.
There’s quite a lot to take in so we’ve set up accountability groups (not as scary as it sounds!) - which allow us to work together in smaller groups to recap what we’re learning and to help each other find ways in which to embed it into our working (& everyday) lives.
The big benefit of the course is the shared language it has given us; going through the course with such a large cohort is entirely different to just learning something on your own and helps what we learn become part of our company culture.
Jonny Peacock, UX Architect, Torchbox
For our clients, we appreciate that how we communicate is key to a successful engagement. Therefore, we’re using our learnings from the training to develop and encourage good communication, to ensure we make the most of all client meetings, as well as developing a Torchbox Client Management Guide to refer back to.
One of the things I’ve found most useful about the training is the tools it’s given me to change how I behave or respond to situations, and I’ve seen this replicated across our team. Memorably, in a recent pitch situation we were able to use what we’d learned about conflict resolution to identify the real issues at stake and to more effectively respond to them - ultimately winning the work.
Ros White, Digital Marketing Consultant, Torchbox
We’re using Team Sterka, which focuses on training and leadership coaching for people in cross-functional teams, such as digital product agencies - like us!
