Pumping The Colors® is an active hands-on team building simulation for groups of five to ten participants. It challenges them to execute a complicated task under conditions that require them to perform as a team. The process of accomplishing the task distills the excitement of a game and the inspiration of solving a real-life problem into an unexpectedly powerful learning experience.
More specifically Pumping The Colors is:
- Fantastic for offsite meetings/events to energize staff.
- Perfect for giving new teams a successful start
- Great for helping teams that are in trouble.
- Excellent for teams that want to continuously improve their ability to work as a team
- Critical for companies that are weighing the pros and cons of instituting team concepts into their work force.
Pumping The Colors is for any group that wants to introduce teams to the organization, improve the ability of existing teams to be more productive, focus on total quality management, boost productivity or morale after right/down-sizing, or introduce teams as part of a new corporate philosophy.
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Pumping The Colors: build skills, deal with difficult issues, practice as a team.
Most work teams are very good at setting schedules, budgets and goals, but find it almost impossible to talk about the team issues. We believe this is true for three reasons:
- They don't know what behaviors or skills are required to create an effective team.
- Team members try to avoid conflict. It's very hard for teams to understand that, unless they face difficult issues squarely, they will come back to poison the team.
- Teams don't have the opportunity to practice as a team. As Peter Senge said, "If anything, team skills are more challenging to develop than individual skills. This is why learning teams need 'practice fields', ways to practice together so that they can develop their collective learning skills. The almost total absence of meaningful 'practice' or 'rehearsal' is probably the predominant factor that keep most management teams from being effective learning units."
We believe Pumping The Colors answers all three of these roadblocks to team development. The Seven Practices teaches them what they have to do to become a better team. The Pumping The Colors experience gives them practice becoming a better team. And the Pumping The Colors self-coaching method gives them a way of using their real world team activities as a practice field. The Seven Practices self coaching method also greatly reduces the conflict on the team by bringing up tough issues before they become serious problems.
How will team members benefit from Pumping The Colors?
Team members will:
- Understand the seven behaviors required of every member of a high performing team.
- Clarify and set standards of performance for their team. Once these standards are set team members will use these standards to encourage, motivate, expect , and demand high performing team behavior from one another.
- Understand the three basic types of teams and which type is best for each situation.
- Understand, many for the first time in their lives, what it really means to be part of a team.
- Understand the importance and role of team leadership in different types of teams.
- Learn how his or her work style affects the team.
- Learn how the work style of others affects the team.
- See improved team performance, strength, and confidence.
- Know what type of work styles to include on different types of teams.
- Understand the different types of teams and how to create the best team for the task.
- Learn what highly individualistic team members must do to be effective team members.
- Learn how to avoid the 6 most common types of team problems.
- Learn how to resolve conflicts in a constructive manner.
- Learn how to conduct an effective team meeting.
- Learn what they must do to continuously improve team performance.
Become an Authorized Reseller:
For external consultants or those looking to resell this program, please contact us through our website or call (858)450-3400 for further information.
Pumping The Colors is delivered in TEAMS but purchased in two pieces:
- A Director's Kit which includes everything the facilitator needs to learn how to run the program ($400). See below for more details.
- One set of participant materials for each person going through the program, these materials are consumable. A MASTER PTC KIT which includes all of the materials needed for the TEAM process is used during the simulation then returned to us for cleaning and refurbishing. The use of the Master Kit is included in the per person price. There are full day and half day versions of PTC. The retail price is $195* per person for the half day version and $245* for the full day version.
The Participant Materials need to be ordered directly from Simulation Training Systems (not available online) due to special shipping requirements. Please contact us by email at sales@simulationtrainingsystems.com, or call directly at 858 450-3400.
*Are you a consultant who's interested in reselling or using Pumping the Colors with clients? If so, please contact us to discuss special opportunities.
For example, if you're planning to conduct a training session for 2 teams of 7 participants, you'll need to purchase one Director's Kit (which is reusable) and 14 sets of participant materials. The participant materials are consumed and include everything each person needs to participate in the simulation. We would send two Master Kits (one for each team), which will be returned to us.
Teach Your Teams To Coach Themselves To High Performance.
The Seven Practices of High Performing Teams, developed by R. Garry Shirts, are used as the foundation for teams coaching themselves to higher performance. Using the exercises with the Seven Practices the teams will:
(a) reduce turnover
(b) increase the chances of turning potentially destructive conflicts into benefits for the team
(c) increase the effectiveness of planning and follow through meetings
(d) improve the performance on every one of the practices of the Seven Practices
(e) increase the probability of becoming a high performing team
(f) make it possible for new members to participate and feel part of the team.
Features & Benefits of PTC
Seven Practices of High Performing Teams.
All members of the team understand and agree on the team’s purpose.
How many? How much time?
This is a very flexible program, there are half day and full day versions available. Each team usually consists of 5 to 10 persons. One facilitator can manage two or three teams. We can help with ideas or additional facilitators for larger groups.
What Happens in Pumping The Colors? Simulation includes:
Teams build a tri-color delivery system out of pipes and tubes on a eight foot protective mat. If they are successful they will be able to use their system to deliver any one of three colored solutions to any one of 12 targets. The task challenges the team to think creatively, to work interdependently, to manage scarce resources, to deal with pressure and stress.
Early in the simulation teams experience all four stages of team development: forming, storming, norming and performing. The team holds two team meetings to evaluate their team performance. They also receive instruction on how to organize teams, reduce conflict, work with different work styles, coach themselves and many other essential skills required for team development. Later in the simulation the team generally realizes that they all have been performing far below their capability. They then focus on what must happen to improve their performance.
Facilitating Pumping The Colors
Pumping The Colors used to be our only simulation which required attending a certification course. We’ve replaced the two-day Train-The-Trainer with a comprehensive Director’s Kit, which allows the facilitator to view a complete Train-The-Trainer session of Pumping The Colors, evaluate its effectiveness, and to become certified as a facilitator. The Director’s Kit includes an annotated video of the Train-The-Trainer experience, detailed step by step instructions on setting up, running and debriefing Pumping The Colors along with marketing and support materials as well as personal video conference orphone support. We've found this new platform upholds the quality assurances while making the simulation much more accessible.
Testimonials
Myron Bish, a facilitator who uses Pumping The Colors on a regular basis:
“This is a facilitators dream. There is so much richness to mine, I always feel I’m leaving so much on the table.”
Jim Perry, a facilitator who uses Pumping The Colors with Advantage Performance Group.
“Truly a discovery-based learning experience with very little explaining. We had a great session, very well received! Got lots of positive feedback from participants, the CEO, and the buyer. ”
Oracle forms teams of its new employees. These teams compete for 6 weeks to build an effective software program. When the winning team was asked how they won, they said:
“Every Monday morning we met as a team and went over the seven criteria of a successful team from the Pumping The Colors simulation and asked ourselves how we were doing.”
Nestle’s of Canada used it to inculcate the seven values of the company into 900 of their employees. When they finished with the 900, they signed up for 400 more. When asked about Pumping they said:
- “It’s incredibly powerful.”
- “It’s so rich.”
- “It’s referred to long after the experience is over.”
- “It was easily tailored to fit our needs.”
American Water Works conducted a level 3 evaluation of their training program built around Pumping the Colors. The results of the study:
The Managers who went through the program improved at a statistically significant level over a control group on 8 out of 10 behaviors measured.
Bill Nicholson from Chaparral Steel:
“Pumping The Colors is the only program of the many that we’ve used that’s produced significant and permanent change in our bar mill.”
Explore Our Other Business Simulations
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Not quite sure yet?
Why not call us at 858450-3400 or visit our contact page, we would love to chat with you!
Pumping the Colors In the 2 top french universities
France is famous for the quality of its engineers and some of its technical and scientific breakthroughs.
There are a number of famous scientific and engineering schools. The 2 best ones are: l’Ecole Polytechnique et l’Ecole des Mines (probably equivalent to Harvard and MIT). The number of students selected is limited. Only the best students with great intellectual capacities are recruited every year.
They generally become the leaders of our greatest corporations such as Airbus, Michelin, Alstom or our Banks, Insurances as well as Ministers in our governments. Belonging to such schools communiqués is the guarantee of a successful career.
The teaching methodology is quite conventional. But to prepare the students to Team management both schools have selected “Pumping the Colors” experience to communicate and teach the required skills to lead a project management team.
According to the teachers this experience is greatly appreciated by students,as It helped them to realize what will be expected from them as future managers and executives. In particular, they understand that great mathematical and technical intelligences are not sufficient. The ability to create a collective intelligence and benefit from individual émotional intelligence and sociability are key factors of success.
We are very proud that PUMPING THE COLORS created by Garry Shirts plays a role In the training of the french corporate elites.