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? 

 I am 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.

 Whatever you are going through now, there is going to be a time, you are going to see the fruit of what you planted. So the learning curve has been, you know, the moment you plant a seed is not the moment you start seeing it grow immediately. The first thing it does is that it grows the roots and when the roots are growing, you don’t see it. The same thing I business. So everything you do in the first two years of your business, it’s like a watering.

 You are watering and watering and watering. I know the day, I don’t know if it is spiritual or psychological, I call it the burden in my book, you know when something shoots and you are like ooh. It was two years later. As a matter of fact, it was the first day of the year, that was first January 2011. I was washing my car out of frustration because by then, all the millions had gone. I had used my savings from working at the bank, I didn’t make anything, I paid rent for two years for the place, I didn’t make anything, I was paying salary for two years and all that. So I was washing my car out of frustration like okay, this is another new year and I don’t even know and my phone rang and it was very hilarious and the guy on the other side was like is this Team Build International and I said yes. He had an American accent and he said he was calling from the United Nations office in Abuja and that they have a retreat on Wednesday and they want me to facilitate the retreat. I thought it was one of my guys that was trying to prank me, and I was like T.J, don’t prank me like this. This is the first day of the year and you can’t be doing this. When the man said ‘excuse me’, that was when I realised it’s not him. That was how we got the first major job. Up till that day, I never knew or met the guy. By Wednesday we were having a retreat for United Nations High Commission for Refugees in Kaduna. Up till today, I don’t know how they got the contact. That is part of the learning curve.  

Now, I use that to teach people when I am talking about entrepreneurship and all that because young people once they start business want to start seeing profit in another six months. They want to buy Mercedes. So, the first two years was really tough. So after that, it was just smooth sailing at each year, you see growth each year even in a situation where other businesses are having difficulty that is where we see a lot of growth.

What do you think is the high point of your journey?

The high points apart from the benefits will always be the relationship and network. It creates a lot of networking net. That is what networking is. It creates a lot of support base for you. You meet a lot of people. You impact a lot of people along the line and they are the ones spreading the news about the company and what team building is all about. I’ve met people who say they want Team Building international to handle this because they do it professionally. That is a major highlight for us. The kind of contact this has created and I am talking from you meeting ambassadors or ambassadors being in your class or in your session and you are like how did I get here. Teaching ambassadors what he is supposed to be teaching us. It’s actually the relationship. You meet people that you never even envision that you are going to meet. 

You touched on mentorship, I’d like you to speak on that. Do you have people you mentor?

Of course, I have a lot of people I mentor just like a lot of people mentored me too. I grew up among mentors. In terms of entrepreneurship, my mom is always our copy, our model. From growing up until now that she is 92, she always has something to do. She can’t stay still. She is either selling something or growing something. She is always doing that. And if you are not doing that, that means you are a lazy person so you can’t be a lazy person around me because that is the mentality we have of growing up. There was always be something you have. In terms of mentorship, this is a successful one because if you have done one business that is successful, it mean you have done like 10 that was not successful. I call them transiting business. For example, what I did during COVID is different from this because nobody was doing this. So I always tell people the first principle for me as an entrepreneur is you must always have something on your shelf. That means you must be creative. You must have innovative, creativity bank. You must have an idea bank which I call the shelf. 

It’s the season of Artificial Intelligence. What do you think is the future of what you are doing with the incursion of AI?

I think the strong part of what we do, is a human relationship thing. I see it as an opportunity that is going to open up in the area of team building. The more we go into technology, the more humans are going to have less interface. So the more you go into technology the more strains you would see in human relations and when you see strains in human relations, then you call us. 

Just 2020, one of our clients started operation across Africa and they were about to open in Nigeria so they were about to launch to come together, meet and start the company physically then COVID and the lockdown started. So 2020, 2021, 2022, they were working seamlessly but online. They didn’t see themselves for two years. So the next thing they did when they were to meet themselves, they had a retreat and a major part of the retreat, in fact the objective of that retreat was to team bond, to team build. 

The more we go into the technological advancement, the more you’d be seeing strains because human relationship, you can’t put it aside. There would still be that human conflict that you have to resolve. So the more people that are working from home now, the more they are calling us because there are issues that people did not even envisage. 

I’d want to know your projections for the future?

The plan for the future is something we have been saying even before the 15 years that we started. The future will one, we are going to have an institution. We are going to institutionalise this and make it a main stay. Put it as a sub genre in HR: as a stand alone because there are so many things that we would not understand in terms of human relationship and psychology that have to do with team development that people are doing all over the world now. 

So, we want to institutionalise that and go into more of research and workplace and team psychology, team dynamics and with that kick-starting what we call the Team Building Academy. Part of that is looking at how we can help organisations develop in terms of all the kinds of teams so we are going to be partnering with other organisations which are into teams development. 

It’s just like saying if you want a safety team in your organisation, we collaborate with safety experts all over the place. What we want to do is also to have a facility which over the fifteen years, we relate with all the best venues and resorts across West Africa and across Africa especially in Nigeria because that is where we have our meetings.There are very few places that are conducive for team building… so we are going to be designating places we call team building destinations. That brings us into a bit of tourism because part of what we do is not just you are having a lecture. It can be an executive retreat or tour. Over the years we have flown some of our clients to exotic places and that is team building. 

What are your expansion plans?

We are also looking at expansion and thank God for technology. What we are looking at which is part of the reason we are emphasising Africa is because it looks as if anytime we are in Nigeria, things are okay, few people know us outside of Africa but we want to pinpoint very specific places like Ghana, Kigali, Nairobi, London and maybe South Africa where we can partner people because from my experience, you don’t need a big facility. All you need is people with passion and people who understand where you are going. You can partner  people and franchise and because of technology, you can easily work across borders and collaborate creatively over that. 

So we are looking at that this year especially our since our roots have grown than the first year that we started. One of the things we wanted to do in the first two years was flow to the Gambia but now we can refocus and say let’s go back to the drawing board to say what is the vision and what do we have in stock.

About YINKA OLUGBODI

Yinka Olugbodi has worked in world class organisation like Congress WBN, Multichoice Group and Access bank Group up to the executive position in Senior Management under HR and General Resources functions.

 Yinka started his career in 1994 as a Sales Coordinator with Multichoice Nigeria and rose to the Group Head of Human Resource. He later moved to Access Bank Plc. As Head of General Resources before starting Teambuilding International as the first solely team development and learning consultancy firm in 2009. 

He is a member of Nigerian Institute of Training and Development (NITAD), Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), Nigerian Institute of Management (NIM), Congress WBN (CWBN)Global Leadership Interlink (GII) and The Fortress.

Yinka received Bachelor’s degrees in English Language at University of Lagos and a Master of Science degree in Human Resources Management from the ESUT Business School. He is a reformational Speaker, efficient team builder, organiser and team good player. He has a strong desire to actualisr all innate potentials and abilities that can advance a meaningful cause.

He has travelled wide to US, Europe and most countries Africa with passion for speaking to youths in his spare time. He is an expert on Team Development and facilitates retreats, strategy sessions and teambuilding activities. He is known as one of the foremost team development expert and facilitator on this side of the world.

As a Teambuilder, Yinka has pioneered several business teams, partnered with others to build teams and most especially facilitated numerous team development projects and programs while also offered consultancy services for the same. The highlights of his team and organisation development are numerous but he has rendered his consultancy and facilitation services in:

• Major merger and acquisitions like Access Bank/Intercontinental

• Managing and facilitating international and national retreats for multinationals and international organizations like Cadbury-Ghana, NPA-Dubai & New York, World Food Program-Maiduagri, Accessbank-Ghana & Congo, Dufil- annually, KEDCO-annually, WATCO-across Nigeria ete

• Facilitating corporate retreats for clients like Bank of Industry, Flour Mills Nigeria, SWIPHA, etc

• Facilitating and consulting foreign missions and diplomatic teams like EU delegation to WA, Canadian High

Commission, International Labours Organisation, WFP and UNHCR etc

• Facilitating and consulting for International NGOs and Not-for-Profit teams like Oxfam, Action Aid, Pact, Hellen Keller, VSO, Matt Macdonalds, USAID and UKAID…..