G4S Leadership Programme

Last Updated (Friday, 27 February 2009 17:07)

Team Building Breakout Session

On 11th and 12th February Quest were delighted to work once again with G4S, delivering breakout sessions at G4S’s week long Leadership Programme.

The delegates were from G4S offices and operating locations from across the globe, and the week provided the opportunity for colleagues, who normally work as far apart geographically as Demark and Argentina, to come together and work closely during a very full and highly developmental event.

As in 2008, Quest were asked to deliver a breakout session on both Wednesday and Thursday evening, with the primary objective for both sessions to be to enable the delegates to work together on communication focused activities that would deliver valuable experiential team-building learning.

On the first night Quest delivered a team building activity called 3 Cubes ~ Building a Pyramid of Success. This involved the delegates working initially in three teams to solve a complicated pictorial puzzle. As the activity progressed the three teams worked independently. However, through a series of facilitated leaders’ meetings the delegates worked out one solution to the overall task which was that for them to achieve final success the three teams would have to come together and pool information and resources. Once that was worked out and agreed the three teams were then able to complete not just the puzzle but also build the giant pyramid, which they finally did with a few minutes to spare.

Learning that resulted from the first session’s team building activity was the importance of:

Thursday night’s team development session kept the delegates very much on their toes, with a complete change of tempo and task. TV Newscast was the team development activity: Working in only two relatively large teams of 12 the delegates had just over one hour to disseminate a large amount of information, allocate roles, put together a range of scripts, perform presentation tasks (that were launched on them with only a few minutes notice), prepare prop’s and conduct a rehearsal before going live to camera and delivering a 6 minute television newscast production.

Due to the constraints of the overall leadership programme timetable the delegates had an hour removed from the production time usually allocated on many versions of this intervention.  Despite the incredibly tight time constraints imposed on the two teams, as the “studio manager” facilitator gave the final minute countdown the first team were ready to go live to camera and both the first and second newscast productions were worthy of prime time TV and mightily amusing too!

Learning that resulted from the team building activity was the importance of: