Leadership and team work training at Blue Water Yachting

At MTa, we’re a small specialised team focused on designing and supplying training materials that enable facilitators to deliver world class experiential learning. We care about what we do. And so, when a kit leaves the shelf, we want to know what it’s being used for, who’s using it and what they think of it. So we asked four leading learning and development professionals about their MTa Kits.

First in this series is an interview with John Wyborn, Director of Crew Training at Blue Water Yachting, based in Antibes, France.

John uses MTa Insights and MTa Team Kit for running leadership and team work training with yacht crews.

Why did you buy the MTa Team and Insights Kits?
we chose the MTa Kits because we run leadership and team working training at two different levels. We wanted to get the concepts of team working, leadership and management across to our students and we found the MTa Kits useful for that. Martin’s experiential learning approach is a good fit for us; seafarers need to facilitate, so we’re training them to become facilitators, to use their skills to explore in the maritime environment: listening; encourage independent thinking; and achieve their goals. MTa Kits allow our students to extract the lessons learnt and use them, drawing conclusions without being told.

Who do you use MTa Kits with?
We provide yacht crew training so we use the MTa Kits with team leaders, engineers, masters of ships, heads of departments and captains.

What do you use MTa Kits for?
We use the MTa Kits to engage people, there’s no PowerPoints, no paper work, it’s an engaging, spatial course. We use them to run two different Human Element, Leadership and Management (HELM) courses. The first is for mid management, it’s 3 days and designed for team leaders. The second is for engineers, masters of ships, heads of departments and ship captains and it focuses on the wider goals of senior management. It’s particularly useful for captains to learn about interacting with other people, managing teams and exploring issues.

What do your participants think of it?
Our participants have never seen anything like it before. We use an MTa activity to start the course and the participants quickly realise this is not like anything else, they enjoy it. Our student satisfaction index is high because of the MTa materials – our participants never get bored.

If you’d like to find out more about how using MTa Insights and MTa Team Kit can help your training make an impact, contact one of the MTa team.