Socitm’s Top Talent course lets you explore how you work with colleagues then apply this to creating and delivering a team presentation, writes In Our View editor SA Mathieson
A lot of training courses try to get across a set of facts and techniques on one topic. Socitm’s Top Talent course, in which I participated this spring, is about something much broader – how you interact with other people. Facilitator Aidan Matthews shared ideas from a wide range of writers and thinkers, encouraged us to talk about which were useful and talk about our own experiences and views.
If the course has a single message it is that there is no single way to manage or lead people. Instead, you need to find methods that you are comfortable with and work out when to use them. I saw the appeal of coaching and democratic approaches which often work well with journalists and other knowledge workers.
The course also explores team behaviour, both through exercises over the two days and an online test questionnaire run by the team role company Belbin, which assesses people’s preferences on nine types of team behaviour or roles including implementers, specialists and completer-finishers. Each has strengths and weaknesses and as they are types of behaviour rather than baked-in characteristics you can use the results to support changes.
Belbin also allows you to ask colleagues to complete an ‘observer’ version to build a more complete picture. It was interesting to compare how I saw myself with how others saw me and I was pleasantly surprised to find that people I work with thought I can do some things better than I did.
As Aidan made clear in the course, a strong team needs people with a variety of behaviours. This proved to be useful in completing the course’s project, to create and deliver a team presentation at a Socitm event. In our case, we would discuss generative artificial intelligence at the society’s biggest event of the year, the President’s Conference.
Among my team of five, Carlotta showed her organisational skills by setting up the first discussion call then compiling everyone’s slides, as well as providing a view from the private sector. I wrote a scene-setting introduction, Rhys and Craig drew on their public sector experiences and Ian would summarise. Socitm provided a Teams instance to support collaboration and by the time we arrived for our third and final day of training the day before the conference we had a draft set of slides. In the afternoon we rehearsed with these and Aidan gently suggested that a few images would make the slides work better. We redesigned them with images.
I had first presented at a small conference in 2012. Since then I have given lectures on dozens of occasions and watched hundreds of people deliver presentations at events. While that gave me more experience than some, it was still daunting to walk up the stairs on to the President Conference’s raised stage with its lectern, microphone, screen the size of a modest cinema and 100 or so people looking on.
However – as I had told other team members before based on previous Top Talent presentations – Socitm tends to provide a friendly audience. Delivering a big presentation for the first time is like driving onto a busy road when a nervous learner. However, on Socitm street everyone sees your L-plates, remembers what it was like and gives you some extra space.
Top Talent is a refreshingly broad training course that lets you explore how you behave when leading and collaborating, share experiences with professionals at a similar level then collaborate on a presentation you deliver to a big but friendly audience. There are lots of reasons to take part – and the feeling of relief on successfully completing the presentation is certainly one of them.
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