Yinka Olugbodi: The Team Builder Extraordinaire
With an Honorary Doctorate in Leadership and Development and a Doctoral Fellow of the Institute of Leadership Manpower and Management Development, Yinka Olugbodi is a sought-after team development consultant and facilitator. Call him the "Team Builder" and you are not far from the truth. The Managing Consultant and CEO of Team Build International, TBI, a team development and training consultancy, who also doubles as the Lead Facilitator of TBI Academy, a full fledged team training and development facility dedicated to helping organisations train and develop the human resources, had worked with world class organisations in the financial sector before he veered to fulfil his passion as a Team Builder. Amongst other things, in this interview with Chiemelie Ezeobi, he shared how he pioneered focus on a genre in human resources for 15 years and created a niche
What exactly do you do?
Iam the Managing Consultant and CEO of Team Build International. Team Building International (TBI) is a team development and training consultancy. We usually pride ourselves as the pioneer in starting a solely team development consultancy and training organisation in West Africa and a bit of team building. That's what I have been doing in the past 15 years.
Can you explain Team Building further?
Team building is actually a very genre in human resources and so what we've done is just to capitalise on that aspect and carve a niche in it because when we were starting 15 years ago, we saw there was a big demand in that area. We do a lot of team building trainings, team bonding events, executive retreats and we facilitate meetings for individuals, private sector, international organisations and even a number of government parastatals as well as state and federal ministries.
Overtime, part of what we are doing is also to educate people on what team building is all about and the benefits especially in an environment or industry where we have a lot of inefficiency and dysfunctional systems. Usually that is always caused because it is very difficult for people to work together as a team. That is where we come in. I usually tell people as long as you are not working together or collaborating; as long as there is no cooperative behaviours among them, we have a job to do. It has been fantastic.
So you can say for the past 15 years that you have done this, you have seen credible results after your trainings?
Absolutely. And the good part of it is, it is even the return job. For example, three weeks ago, I was at one of the parastatals I don't want to mention their name here but I think four years ago, we had a corporate build team retreat with them. Corporate means everybody in the organisation. We started with the managers and above and every other person junior to the senior. I think they were about 100 staff. We did it four years ago and so they called us three weeks ago and what the HR manager was saying was that, that is the meeting she would never forget because it was so impactful. The impact of that is that people get to know one another. People get to know what makes you tick, what do I look out for if I want to work with you. What do I need to avoid? What do we need to compromise on? At the end of the day, all our meetings produces a productive team that still add benefits and productivity to all the organisations. So we over 15 years, it has been very tremendous. As a matter of fact, I have not seen any client (and we have done thousands of retreats and meetings) that would come back and say this wasn't impactful. So the return jobs are usually the testimonial that we have done a good job.
Obviously in the past 15 years, there are people that would have come up to do what you are doing now, how have you navigated the marketplace so far?
The first market strategy we did was a niche. We carved a niche. So for almost 10 years, we were not doing anything than team building. With that, we did not only carve a niche, we also created an identity for us. For example, if you go to social media, when people see me, they can't even remember my name, what they would say is Team Builder. It has become an identity.
So, the first thing is that we created that niche. That was very intentional so that at the end of the day, people will always remember us. In terms of pioneering it, we can say we are not the pioneers. We are just one of the pioneers. But in terms of we saying we are a team development consultant, we pioneered that. What usually happened before now was that there were trainings organisation that do training and development and all that. So part of it that they now do is team building, team development or meeting facilitation or executive retreat facilitation but for me, we are only doing anything team building. And there is a lot. It's almost as if you are operating and industry within an industry.
So part of what we are also doing is educating people. One of the things we are doing this year now that is our 15th year is actually to institutionalise what we are doing. So we are starting what we call the Team Building Academy because it will also take care of the training. There are so many trainings we can do under that. Then because of my background as an HR person with strong bias for training and development or learning and development, we are going to be developing teams and also in collaboration with other training organisations. We can develop an HR team. We work with maybe ISTEM or the IPM or we can develop a safety team then we can would work with Hybrid which is one of the number one safety consultants.
So is it safe to say that you are diversifying from just team building to other spectrums of Human Resources?
We are not diversifying. It's more of team development. It's about you developing a team and now it's as if you are going into the practical aspect. If you want to build a Business Team, because of our background and understanding of the dynamics of what goes into putting people together, we can help out in that area. We can say one of our client is Lagos Business School. We can collaborate in that area because they have been building business teams in that area, then we bring the team development dimension just like what we have been doing.
What we are doing now that is making it more is that a lot of people don't focus on this area and that goes back to answer that question. That is a business principle for me. I don't like doing what everyone else is doing. If I have to do what everyone else is doing, then I have to do it differently from what everyone else is doing that looks new and that is one of our big advantage in the market- we do it professionally. We deliberately do that professionally because it actually defines what team building is all about.
So you go beyond just theoretical trainings to practical?
Absolutely. As a matter of fact it is over 65 per cent practical. We don't call it practical, we call it action learning method. So we use a lot of action learning methodologies in our system. When we talk about Action learning, we can use anything to buttress the learning point. So what we are supposed to do theoretically or give a lecture on, we demonstrate it. We demonstrate it through games, through activities, through experiential learning.
Another aspect of action learning is experiential learning. So it's not just let's go to the beach and have fun. At the beach, we can create an atmosphere where the more experienced members of the team can now share their experiences and we pick out the learning points for the team helping us to understand that and build on it. So it's not just let's go out and have fun, everything is deliberate. Everything. The venue is deliberate. The kind of programme we do in terms of activities, in terms of games, activities and role plays is very deliberate. Everything has an objective which is the thing I always tell people. Everything you do must always have an objective.
Let me take you back a bit. As one of the pioneers in team building in Nigeria, what was your thought process? What made you to say this is who I want to be and this is what I want to explore?
That is part of the book I am writing now. It is called Team Building in Africa. It is a very pictorial book again. Not a book you have to read. It talks about the hundred best things that we work for in Africa and it talks about the begining. The beginning was fun really. I was mentored by a very good HR leader in the country as an HR executive under a good Group HR when I was working with one of the multinationals.
One of the things he introduced early when I was building my career that was over twenty years ago now in HR was the team bonding. So every month, we had to organise a team bonding event for the staff every month. But nothing too big. I think maybe quarterly we have to all go to a beach or go somewhere and have .... I mean it was just fun and he made it my responsibility. That was one of my own KPIs and job description and I just enjoyed it and that brought out the facilitation skill.
One Monday morning, one of my colleagues who was driving into the office told me that one of his uncle working at Total Energies, then they were Total Nigeria, wants somebody to do an ice breaker. An ice breaker is just a short activity you do just to kickstart people and wake them up before a meeting. A five minutes ice breaker and I said okay, fine. I walked over to the place and I can't even remember what I did and everybody there was like wow. As I was leaving, the GM who is the uncle handed me an envelope. So, I wasn't expecting because it was just five minutes. The envelope was thrice my monthly salary. That was when the alarm blew in my head and the bright bulb was like if this guy can give me thrice my monthly salary for five minutes, what if it was a whole day session which I am used to.
I googled team building facilitators and I found out that actually, what happened that they are calling me. I discovered that they are supposed to fly somebody from the US to come and do the team building which means if you have to fly in somebody from the US, nobody is doing it in Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa or Africa. That was how the business aspect came into my mind and right there and then I just did a business plan and I put it on the shelf and the right time came almost nine years or ten years later.
What are the learning curves you've had so far?
The major learning curve in starting a business is like you planting a seed. That is the major learning curve. That is very fresh in my mind because it is part of what I am writing in the book. The growth comes systematically just like any growth. The first three years that we planted let me use it metaphorically, we didn't see anything happening and majorly because my expectation was beyond what was supposed to happen.
My expectation was just unrealistic at the beginning because I worked in a bank and I went from the bank to start this so, maybe my taste was a bit too high. So instead of getting a small space to start. I went to get a big space and two big training rooms for 50 people each. Furnished the whole place spent millions of money and for two years, nothing happened in that facility.
Did you ever think of giving up?
Of course. I had a lot of offers. I had offer to go back to my job, I had offer for HR directorship somewhere, I had offer to get out of the country, I had so many offers. As a matter of fact, I had offer even from one of the biggest insurance companies in Nigeria as the HR director and the last meeting was with the chairman of the bank. It was an interview which was just a chat because we had already conducted the last interview and he said young man this is not your passion, tell me about your passion. By the time I started telling him about team building, he said go for your passion.