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| A wonderful stow away in my luggage - family support. |
At the start of the week we were put into (mostly random) groups that by the end of the week are expected to work up and present on a case study. The team I'm part of, team sky, has dipped its toes into the case study prior to today but this morning most of us were reading it after breakfast. Throughout the day it became a pivot, so much so that we ended up working on it for three hours, from the end of formal events until after the bar opened [Doh!].
A lot of what we covered this morning, and our Belbin team roles work yesterday came into play. This morning Liz Gosling had yet another stand out activity which really got everyone in the room, and each of the teams we're members of thinking pretty hard. What was great was that David in our team came up with a left field suggestion, which it turns out has only happened once before in the past 5 years. Come along in 2013 to have your own A hah! moment in this organisational decision making session.
The following sessions were on emotional intelligence and managing for performance. Willie Pritchard took us through an introspective look at our own emotions through the emotional intelligence framework by Mayer and Salovey, popularised by Daniel Goleman's book. Again Willie's low bullet point per slide, eliciting of experiences from the group and engaging style made for an interesting and useful session. For myself, and a couple of other attendees I've talked to since, the tactics of:
- reflecting on events good and bad was a timely reminder that intentional reflection and making time for it is a valuable thing to do.
- seek out a mentor and or trusted colleague whit whom you can share emotionally charged work events to get perspective.
Managing for performance was run by Judy Stokker. She outlined to us what is and isn't the manager's role. Some options for creating motiviational environments, and the TRAC relationship model.
- T - trust
- R - respect
- A - affection
- C - confidence
Judy also covered performance issues, and elicited a lot of experiences from all those present which added to the emotion in the room. Usefully for me she went over tips for having more successful performance related meetings as well as ways of giving feedback well. Finally she provided us with a small case study to work in our groups on regarding a gifted staff member.
After afternoon tea we came back in for the formal time set aside for working on our team sky response to the case study set at the start of the week. With the presentation on Friday everyone was keen to get things underway. Talking with one of my team's members after dinner we both felt that our team had a very good dynamic, but right at this point everyone was suggesting great ideas but we plunged from helicopter view to face down in the weeds every few minutes. Fortunately we had an enforced circuit breaker for the attendee photograph. While out for the photo another member of our team who has a lot of experience and had been trying to keep us on task suggested we change the way we were working to try and move us beyond our death spiral. Bingo, a change in the way we were documenting our project planning and we were performing, just at Tuckman predicts in his stages of group development.
We'd been artificially formed by the organisers of the event, we'd normed over the past couple of days as everyone learnt a little about each other, we'd stormed and frustrated each other with earlier exercises and the start of our case study and finally we'd broken through that wall and started performing. What was really interesting was that everyone in the team was happy to commit more than the allotted time to getting as far as we could. So much so that we were late for the launch of the special CAUDIT cocktail.
All in all a useful time, for me and everyone I got the chance to ask today.
Dorje
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