Quest Team Building in Switzerland
Team Building With The European Space Agency Once More
Quest was delighted to be asked to work with European Space Agency (ESA) again in September 2011. Following the resounding success of the team building in Holland in June 2010, Quest was recommended to another division of ESA to deliver a day of facilitated team building during a two day off-site.
Cow Bells and Swiss Watches
It was a case of pack the passports again as another piece of overseas work came in for Quest. Following a meeting in Italy, Quest was asked to deliver a facilitated team building programme in the beautiful foothills of the Swiss Alps, near to the world famous home of Gruyere Cheese. A recce was made in early July and one of the two proposed training venues was chosen, and the brand new Bulle Ibis Hotel given the green light.
Espace Gruyere seemed to be an excellent training venue at the planning stage, and that positive feeling was born out at the time of delivery. Outstanding service, a friendly management team and state of the art training facilities. With the sound of cow bells easily heard in the fields surrounding Bulle, Espace Gruyere was run with the precision of a Swiss watch.
Classroom Facilitation and Experiential Team Building
The ESA HR and Ops programme sponsors were completely clear with their requirements; a balanced mixture of experiential team building and facilitated classroom sessions was required for a participant team of just over 60 managers. After lengthy discussion an MBTI session, including MBTI master-classes was also added to the day’s programme. The experiential sessions had to be delivered indoors, and it was agreed that the Poster Exercise combined with TV Newscast would make up a very varied and full agenda.
Getting to Know One Another
A key requirement was for the team, who are split across Italian and Dutch offices, to really get to know one another. That was started as soon as the programme began with a high energy delivery of Three Truths and a Lie, with the sixty plus participants divided into two sub-teams and tasked with disclosing on sheets of flip chart paper four facts about themselves, one of which had to be a complete lie!
After ten minutes of careful, and in many cases highly imaginative thinking, followed by frantic writing, all the participants were ready to disclose three interesting facts about themselves to their colleagues and also to get one another to guess which the lie was. Some of the information passed around the teams was quite amazing, and extremely amusing.
The theme of self-disclosure then moved into a more reflective and thoughtful phase with the beginning of the morning’s MBTI session. As part of the build-up to the team building all the delegates had completed MBTI Step 1 on line, those reports formed the centre of focus for the morning as the delegates gave careful consideration to their own preferred behavioural styles and also those of their colleagues.
Conducting MBTI with such a large group was full on for the MBTI facilitators of which Quest has three. To enable all the delegates to get as much one to one attention as possible the whole team was split into two from mid-morning and worked on a rotation process: Whilst half of the team were working on a MBTI master-class, the other half started some experiential team building with the poster exercise.
Space Missions at Dinner
The final element of a full day of the team getting to know one another came at dinner that night. Prior to arrival at the restaurant the Quest team had placed ESA mission titles on the backs of all the chairs in the restaurant. Each delegate was given a different list of three mission titles, one for starter, one for main course and one for pudding. As the plates were cleared after each course, the Quest programme director called out “We have lift off,” and all the delegates moved to a new seating position, to enjoy the company of different colleagues.
Paint, Glue, Scissors and Much Debate
Each half of the team that were working on the poster were given a simple team building brief: Within a tight timeframe, using all of the materials (paint, glue, scissors, coloured card, paper and magazines related to space, astronomy and the satellite industry), the whole sub-team had to create a poster that perfectly illustrated exactly what their department within ESA does.
This brief caused huge debate, but as the time element of the exercise became more crucial with each passing minute, discussion turned to action, and the team really started to work together. The other fact that galvanised the sub-team into action was that the poster they created had to be passed to the next sub-team at the next activity rotation, for them to recreate the flip chart sized poster into a giant picture using artist’s canvasses.
Afternoon News
Following an intense morning of self-disclosure and learning an enormous amount about how they each like to perform and behave, the first session of the afternoon gave all the participants the chance to put that theory into practice and apply some of their new knowledge to the experiential TV Newscast Team building exercise.
Working in three sub-teams in separate break out areas, they then absorbed the highly detailed written briefing which told them they had 120 minutes to prepare a television news programme which would be filmed live and in one take and it had to be exactly 7 minutes long. All team members had to appear in front of camera at least once, and to really make the team building a challenge they had a demanding list of ESA topics, some fun, some serious that had to be included. A big challenge!
ESA Blast to Success
As expected the teams rose magnificently to the challenge. Full rehearsals were conducted, timings were checked and re-checked and despite being thrown some unexpected tasks to try to unbalance their calm, all three teams remained unruffled. As the crucial part of the team building arrived, all was ready. Swiss timing was again in evidence as all three teams delivered newscasts measured to the second, and which contained performances that were just as polished. A fine result from a great team of people, many of whom had hardly spent any time together prior to this day.
Reflections and Actions
A huge amount had been achieved from all elements of the day’s team building, and it was vital that learning was captured. A pacey and fast moving wrap up was facilitated to ensure that all of the invaluable take-back was recorded and that led neatly into finishing the day on a real high with the play-back of the finished newscasts. A very full and very rewarding day.
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