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The Community Building Experiential Training Model

When was the last time your staff had a training which they thoroughly enjoyed, were grateful it had been offered to them, learned considerably more than they had expected and improved their interpersonal skills and working relationships with each other?   The impact on the organization is improved relations among staff and between departments, higher morale and improved quality of service.

• Community building; develops ideal learning environment of trust, openness and receptivity.
• Experiential; most effective way to teach skills.
• Insight learning; occurs quickly and almost without effort and is long term.
• Fun and enjoyable; learning is significantly quicker, better and longer if it is enjoyable.
• Immediately applicable; what is learned is usable from then on.
• Universally appropriate; effective with all types of groups, e.g., business, government, schools, volunteers, both in the US and abroad.
• Capacity building; staff can be easily taught to provide this type of training to the organization.
• Transformative; not only are individuals transformed, but also departments and the organization as a whole.  Attitudes change resulting in changed relationships, work habits, morale, productivity and the internal culture matures becoming more receptive and open to system-wide changes.

The health and well being of any group, organization or agency is directly and inextricably linked to the health and maturity of its internal culture.  The more mature the inner culture, the higher the morale, productivity, creativity and quality of service or product.  Just as with individuals, organizations grow and mature.  An organization in which people feel disconnected from each other is immature.  Whereas, an organization in which people and departments feel connected with a high level of trust and cooperation can be described as mature.

The more we feel connected to others and the group, the more our basic psychological needs are met.  After our physical survival, the strongest need we have is for connection, or belonging.  You might say this is the core of our emotional survival.  Once we feel connected, we can then address our higher level needs of meaning, control and fun.  This is true of all humans, in all cultures.  Our needs look something like the following:

• Need to survive: food, safety, shelter
• Need for connection: fulfilled by loving, sharing, cooperating with others, and a sense of belonging
• Need for meaning in life: fulfilled by achieving, accomplishing and being recognized and respected
• Need for control and power over one’s life: fulfilled by having and making choices
• Need for fun: fulfilled by laughing and playing

It is also true that if participants in a training feel connected with each other, i.e., feel a sense of community, they will open up to new ideas, including new interpersonal and intrapersonal skills.  Without this experience of community, participants will hold on to their fears, resentments and need for protection, thus, greatly limiting their trust, respect and learning at all levels.

The antithesis of community is competition, which is the basis of a Command and Control culture.  If there is internal competition within an organization, it tends to lead to dysfunction and a lack of cooperation, collaboration and creativity.  Competition, by definition, means disconnection.  In our culture, competition worked very effectively while we experienced connection in the rest of our lives.  Today, with the breakdown of the family unit, neighborhoods, community schools and other social institutions, the support we used to experience is no longer there.  Thus, we feel more disconnected and escape into drugs, TV, computer games, alcohol, sex and crime [whether Enron or street crime]. 

When an organization, agency or team experiences detrimental conflict and tension, it is because trust and community have broken down, resulting in increased fear and internal competition.  In order to reverse or repair this dysfunction, a sense of community needs to be re-established.  This sense of community cannot be achieved by keynote speakers, didactic trainings or by management “willing” it to happen.  It must be experienced by the employees themselves, which is precisely what the Community Building Experiential training model is designed to accomplish.

The maturity of an organization’s culture is a reflection of its employees’ attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, which are learned or developed through their experiences of life.  To learn new, and hopefully healthier attitudes, beliefs and behaviors, we need to learn them experientially as well.  This experiential aspect of training is a part of community building, but does not, in and of itself, fully accomplish it. 

In order for community to be established in a training, several things need to occur:

·        Participants need to feel validated and respected as people and as professionals.

·        Participants need to learn from and about each other, and as common ground between them develops, so will empathy [the capacity to understand and respond to the unique experiences of another], which is a necessary attribute of community.

·        Participants must experience common ground at a level deeper than superficial similarities, likes and dislikes.

·        Participants must feel the training experience is meaningful to them both personally and professionally.

·        Participants need to feel a sense of control within the training.

·        Participants need to have fun, which keeps the energy up and keeps them engaged as well as enhances learning and memory.

If done effectively, participants naturally lower their defenses/barriers, increase their empathy for others, enhance their own and others’ sense of value and self-worth, and improve their attitudes and behaviors.  Most of the time this occurs effortlessly and naturally with almost no awareness it is occurring.  All they may be aware of is that they are having fun, and feeling better about themselves and the others in the training with them.  All types of learners [auditory, visual and kinesthetic] respond well to this approach. 

Combining the experiential and community building aspects in the same training design has resulted in uniquely positive results.  In one organization, which had over 160 trainings, most of the participants rated the training as excellent and 97% rated it as either excellent or good.  A follow-up study was done and found that over 80% of the participants were continuing to use the skills learned over six months later.  Of interest, is the fact that the participants were “ordered” to attend the training and 75% did not want to be there at first.  The participants enjoyed, appreciated and valued the trainings and the internal culture of this multi-site organization changed.  Departments were proactively cooperating more, individuals were treating each other with more respect, supervisors were using more effective skills and general negativity among staff was reduced.

Organizations and agencies that are experiencing problems, as well as those that are not, can benefit from Community Building Experiential training programs.  This design will not only help participants build on skills they already possess, but it will also help them tap into their own innate health and the innate health of the organization itself.  The development of the organization will mature more toward connection and further away from disconnection.  It is amazing what people can and will accomplish when given the opportunity.  Community Building Experiential trainings are not a panacea in and of themselves.  They provide a framework from which the organization can continue efforts to grow and mature in ways not felt realistic or possible previously. In fact, when organizations are planning on implementing quality improvement programs, Community Building Experiential trainings can provide an environment within which the new programs will be more readily accepted and implemented.  When you transform the internal culture of an individual or organization, anything is possible.

Conflict Resolution Services, Inc.
2300 W. 17th Street, Suite 3
Wilmington, DE 19806
302-777-6753
John@TeamCRS.org

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