Day One Is Complete!

WOW!  What a day!
The theme for the next few days is High Performing Teams.  Shawna O'Grady is our professor and she is good.  And she throws in some jokes from time to time to keep us listening.

After an overview of the objectives and an overview of the Queen's model for high performing teams, we found out who our team members were and did a "getting to know you" exercise.  In our teams, we each had to talk for one minute about an assigned topic, with four topics to cover.  For example, the first round was stating our name, where we come from, where we work, our job title and what a typical day looks like.  Stuff like that times four.

Then we got sent to another breakout area where we did a Bombardment Exercise.  We had to talk about 6 successes (which we identified prior to going to the breakout area) and our team members had to come up with five positive qualities about us.  And then they had to tell us the qualities while kneeling in front of us and then put a sticker with a caption for each one onto a bullseye chart.  That was very humbling for everyone.  Imagine getting praised for roughly 15 minutes straight by people who barely knew you.  Imagine if you could do this at work!  That would certainly break down any barriers that currently exist and you find a more positive platform to operate from.  Of course, now we have to live up to our team members' "ideal" of us formulated from this exercise.

Oh yeah.  There are 28 people in the program; 4 groups of 7.  There are only 5 females in the group.  My calculator says that's 17.8% of the group.  If you are doing your math one degree further, you'll realize that one group would have two women.  That's not my group.  I am the sole chicky with 6 guys.  Two are engineers (one is the president of his company), one is a seasoned executive, one is a surgeon (cancer is his specialty), one is a junior general manager, and one is an internal consultant to the federal government.

My group was so involved in the bombardment exercise that we almost missed lunch!  Sure, Tracy came to remind us that lunch was available, but we decided to go through with everything first.  Fortunately, they extended lunch by 15 minutes, so I had time to wolf down some cold chicken (it was supposed to be cold) and a stuffed zucchini (it was hot) and some salad.  And I grabbed a bit of chocolate cake to keep my energy up.

We spent the rest of the afternoon learning about our HBDI profiles and talking about the different colours.  My profile has changed since I first did it a year ago with work.  I went from a 2121 to a 2112.  I joked with the two engineers on my team (who sit in my row) that they must have knocked the socks off of "blue" (analytic) and they weren't too surprised to see my green-red profile.

Anyway...  It was a long day.  And tomorrow will be even longer.  We go to 9:45pm.  Yikes!

Inspiration for today:

"You'll seldom experience regret for anything that you've done. It is what you haven't done that will torment you. The message, therefore, is clear. Do it! Develop an appreciation for the present moment. Seize every second of your life and savor it. Value your present moments. Using them up in any self-defeating ways means you've lost them forever."


Wayne Dyer