Teamwork and team building speaker: Maarten van der Weijden

Maarten van der Weijden is a speaker on teamwork and team building for teams that need to achieve something big together. A department with a demanding annual target. An organisation after a merger, where two ways of working have to come together. A team that works well as long as things go smoothly, but falls apart when the plan stops working.

His starting point is simple: nobody wins an Olympic medal on their own. Behind every achievement of Maarten's there was a team that was ready day and night. He talks about that team, and about what it needed to keep working under pressure.

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In 2019 Maarten swam the Elfstedentocht: 200 km through the Dutch province of Friesland, without stopping, day and night. It was his second attempt. A year earlier he had not reached the finish.

From the side it looked like a solo achievement. One man in the water. Maarten tells it differently. Around him a medical team monitored his health. There were people handling the logistics, sponsors who made it possible and hundreds of volunteers along the route. Everyone had a role, and every role was needed.

Maarten explains what happens when it gets hard. That is when you see whether agreements about roles really work. Whether people dare to tell each other that something is not going well. And whether the team used the failure of the year before to get better, or to hand out blame.

The same was true of his Olympic title in Beijing in 2008. In the water you swim alone, but you travel the road there with coaches, doctors and people who support you. Later, as a financial manager at Unilever, he saw teams in a large company struggling with the same questions.

He translates that experience to your team: clear roles, trust in each other's expertise, and a fixed rhythm of checking in and adjusting before things go wrong.

After a short briefing call about your team you choose a format. A keynote of 30, 45 or 60 minutes works well to open a team day or kick-off. With a Q&A the team can ask its own questions. In an interactive workshop of 60 to 90 minutes participants work on roles, agreements and feedback within their own team.

A team day only makes sense if something is different on Monday. So Maarten ends by asking the team to make two or three agreements: who does what when the plan stops working, how we give each other feedback, when we check in. Those agreements are small enough to use straight away and concrete enough to come back to later.

Maarten speaks in Dutch and English. Teamwork is closely linked to leadership and resilience. See all formats on talks.