Last week saw the ABS team attend the Australian Government Department of Industry, Innovation & Sciences sponsored Business Entrepreneurs’ Program. This program was entitled “Leading High-Performance Teams” and was designed to understand and bring out the best in teams to raise the bar on performance. The other attendees were from local Central Coast businesses including:
- Not-for-profit Age Care provider
- Fruit Beverage Manufacturer
- Shutter & Blind manufacturer
- Marketing services firm
- Environmental Services Firm
- Avondale Business School
The first task of the day was called “Lost at Sea” where individual team members had to rank from 1 to 15 items needed to survive a capsized boat. Then the team re-ranked the items as a group. It is probably prudent to note at this point that we are academics and that should we have used our combined list we may not have made it out alive!
However, what we did learn is that as a team we are prepared to listen to each other, and understand different points of view and different perspectives. What we really got out of this exercise is that as a team, we are prepared to listen to options that as an individual we would not have even considered. We also realised that we offer a lot of diversity to our team. We are at different stages of our lives, come from different backgrounds, have different genders, ages, and experiences – all of this diversity means that we can offer lots of different perspective on the same issue, and together as a team come up with the best way forward for our business.
To be honest, sometimes you just need to get out of the office, take the team to somewhere different, and reflect on how effective we are as a team. One of the other exercise we did was to embark on a team leadership self-assessment. That is where we all ranked ourselves on issues such as communication, goals, participation and positive atmosphere. Our average reflected the issues we needed to work on, namely managing conflict and clear business goals. The day gave us time to reflect on our individual performance within teams, and our performance as leaders of teams.
So the day ended with our team being pretty happy at our cohesion and our ability to adapt to change, but not our ability to survive in a capsized boat – we are after all far too logical for that! We also came away with some new contacts for our students to take on internships in 2020, so also a great community engagement event for the ABS.
Avondale Business School Team