In this short video, I'm going to share 10 creative options that are available for you to help you and your team develop those complementary skills. Of course, there are loads of training courses, master classes and seminars out there on every topic under the sun, online or face to face. But here are some of the things you might not have thought of. Number one, find a mentor, mentors a more experienced person or a wise owl, someone who's been there and done it from within or from outside your business. This can be really useful for getting new perspectives and ideas for your business, and also for opening doors to new contacts. Secondly, individual coaching is particularly useful for behavioral work.
If you or your team members need to build their confidence get better influencing skills have important conversations. A good coach can really help with those. Number three, team coaching is great for helping you to work more effectively together, particularly when it helps you surface the elephants in the room that you're not quite sure how to deal with, or when you're a good team, but you know, you need to be even better. And a team coach will help you particularly with the relationship building in the team. Fourth one, buddying up with another colleague can help you share skills and knowledge. So Sue in your team might be great at building customer pool for example, she can help Steve who finds it more difficult.
Steve on the other hand, can help Sue improve her data analysis skills. Number five, shadowing or observing someone in action is great, particularly someone who's good at something you or one of your team members needs to develop. So let's say that Joe is great at engaging people when he presents people really liked his presentation. Observe what he does take notes, ask him how he learned those skills, and see if he'll give you a few pointers. It's really helpful to have role models that we can learn from. Number six, I love the weekly or monthly lunch and learn.
They're a great opportunity to share skills and knowledge across the team or across the wider business on a variety of short topics. If you're the boss, you provide a nice lunch Of course, and key team members or guests share their knowledge with the rest of the team on a particular topic. I've seen this work really well with topics such as pitching to a client managing email overload, delegation, and so on. It's important to say it should be an interactive session, not too detailed and certainly not a boring monologue. invite a guest from outside or get one of your team to run the session on their area of expertise or success is a seventh option. Number eight TED talks are great for inspiring you.
There are a wide range of topics on TED Talks. And they're really good for being great presenters in action, how they deliver, how they structure their talk, how they tell stories, and so on. The expertise sharing is number nine. So let's say you're a recruitment expert, you've got a lot of advice you can give growing businesses who are looking to hire staff. You might swap that information with say an accountancy firm who can help you streamline your financial processes. It's a bit like a barter system swapping expertise with someone in a non competitive field.
One small catering company I know caters a monthly lunch for a marketing team. In turn, that marketing team helps the caterers market their business extensively throughout the local area. So it's a real Win win. And the final one you might like to think of is what we call reverse mentorship. So this effectively turns to additional mental role that I mentioned earlier on its head. So in this case, younger or more inexperienced employees, mentor them or senior or more experienced colleagues.
The benefits are twofold. By tasking a younger employee with helping someone more experienced or an old hand, you get the less experienced team member confidence, whilst at the same time, the old hand or the more experienced member of the team, learn some new skills particularly helpful for getting up to speed with new technologies, new innovations, and so on. Another Win win. So one size doesn't fit all. If you think creatively about what your team needs to learn. You don't need to have a really big training budget to help you really develop the complimentary skills that you need.