Explorador de cualidades

This inter-team activity takes the concept of 'prisoners dilemma  (if I help you escape first, can I trust you to help me escape afterwards?) to a new level: no matter how hard teams try, one must win unless both settle for a very poor performance.

The activity demands effective analysis, clear and effective communication, leadership between teams, planning, building and retaining trust, negotiating and.....

The Discussion Topics are:

• Openness, honesty and trust
• Negotiating
• Communicating within and between teams
• Defining and realising success: beating others vs. doing as well as you can
• Inter-team rivalry

To be successful people and organisations must produce something of value to others. These 7 activities introduce this reality.

Enable individuals to practice and develop attitudes and skills that will enable them to be successful in these 3 areas that are common to businesses and many other organisations:

• Customer orientation; realising and believing that business success depend on investing time and effort into understanding and satisfying customers needs, demonstrating a genuine interest in customers
• Selling profitably; working efficiently and effectively, accurate costing, understanding the value of what you are offering, negotiating for profit
• Planning; clearly identifying objectives (organisational, team and individual), agreeing how to achieve these objectives, reviewing progress, revising plans and change.

The Discussion Topics are:

• Business acumen
• Customer focus
• Optimising
• Prioritising
• Problem analysis
• Questioning to illicit information
• Selling (product or ideas)
• Thinking ahead

Two long activities that build on messages introduced in Leadership 1 and 2.

'Maxi Market' uses a project management scenario where groups have to clarify project aims and priorities before working out how to use and bring together each other's personal strengths to meet a customer's needs, whereas Waste Away involves leaders using a team to create a team: subsequently members of these teams manage others who work under pressure to turn the designs into end products.

This activity is for people who need to set targets and plan in a competitive environment. The task is simple, but as new information is received groups need to reconsider earlier decisions: progress needs to be monitored, targets revised and plans changed with everyone's agreement as the task unfolds.

The Discussion Topics are:

• Reviewing progress
• Planning in a competitive environment
• Setting and achieving realistic (stretching?) targets
• Valuing new information and revising targets and plans appropriately
• Understanding and focusing on priorities
• Group decision making.

Helipads involve 2 or 3 competing teams. It is designed to demonstrate how effective team working within and between teams influences business success and highlight the key qualities that influence the process.

Team success is dependent of the value of the final product, but it addition to organising themselves, competing teams need to work together to ensure that they do not reduce the value of their products: the value of any helipad is reduced if two or more are produced to the same specification, but some specifications are more profitable than others.

The Discussion Topics are:

• Understanding and achieving business success
• Planning within and between teams
• Making the most of market opportunities
• Introduction to negotiating
• Developing team skills
• Taking personal responsibility and trusting others to do their job.

The aim is to make money by producing a model oil rig. The value of the oil rig depends on set criteria and everything has a cost. The group has freedom to organise itself in anyway it wishes, but there are 3 set locations (tabletops) where sub-assemblies must be made before they are moved to the final assembly area.

It is all too easy for the task to take over and for the overall aim (making money) to be forgotten.

The Discussion Topics are:

• Project management
• Understanding the big picture and constraints
• Planning
• One team working on a task but in different locations
• Communicating within a team
• Basic finance

The leader has promised that two teams will each deliver a price and a product within a set time. Each team has different constraints, but the tasks seem achievable. Very quickly the stores become a major bottle neck and the promises become daunting. As pressure mounts the need for the manager to focus on the key issues (meeting customer needs and managing human resources) is critical.

The Discussion Topics are:

• Leading different teams at the same time
• Understanding and working with priorities
• Managing changing situations
• Satisfying customers needs
• The cost of rash promises