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Author: naren@hybreed.co

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Program

Senior Team Virtual Engagement through a Keynote

Objective

How do we engage a group of 300 senior leaders virtually?

Background

AWS is a high growth dynamic organization and is one of the foremost firms in the world providing on-demand cloud computing platforms. It enjoys an exceptional talent pool that is used to a fast pace, strategic thinking and aggressive execution model of working.

With the advent of the pandemic, business everywhere was affected. The repercussion was felt on their customers’ businesses. And consequently, on AWS too.

It was an unprecedented scenario and there was a realization that guiding the leaders to cope with this situation – personally and also for managing their teams’ energy was paramount. Hence it was decided to organize an e-meet wherein internal leaders would share and discuss the importance of ‘Resilience’ as a leadership trait in current times.

Solution

When the client discussed this background with us, we understood the context of the session and hence proposed the idea of getting an external leader to share his learning, experiences and tools to build and display Resilience. Our insight being that, an external leader tends to bring in new perspectives and often helps give a unique worldview on the topic to the audience. The proposal thus was to have a keynote session by a well known personality, so that it would segue into the internal sessions being run by the client.

After some internal evaluation, we proposed the name of a legend from the world of sports (cricket) – Mr. Simon Taufel (Ex-ICC Elite Umpires panelist, Winner of a record five consecutive ICC Umpire of the Year awards and first ICC Umpire Performance and Training Manager) considered to be one of the best umpires in the world. We felt this to be a great fit to bring in unique viewpoints, experiences and tools from a different high-performance world. His own personal experiences in Pakistan when the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team happened, added to the context of “resilience” in a seamless manner.

This idea was liked by the client. They appreciated the unique perspective that could be brought in by Simon. A catch-up with Simon was organized to share the business challenge and expectations. It also helped clarify Simon’s views on the topic and what he could bring to the forum.

It was an open, freewheeling discussion. Simon’s humility, energy, ideas and ability to connect were liked by the client instantly. That convinced them to go ahead with the Masterclass. The backend logistics of putting together a structure for the talk, doing a mock run to ensure we were on top of all the IT issues and ensuring there was a smooth hand shake between the FocusU & Amazon teams – was ensured in the next 2 days. Finally, a Masterclass invite was shared by the FocusU team – that was sent internally to around 300 senior leaders who were to be the audience.

On the day of the Masterclass, the client himself moderated the session along with the FocusU advisor. The 60 minutes session by Simon Taufel was extremely well received. The session was capped by an open Q&A session that saw great participation from the audience.

Impact

The session saw us earning another happy client! The Masterclass was concluded with the client appreciating both Simon Taufel and the FocusU team for the effort put in enabling an engaging and insightful session.

The client also mailed a letter of appreciation on receiving an overwhelming positive response from the leaders. Here is what Mr. Amit Jain, Principal HRBP, AWS had to say:

“Wanted to share that we got positive feedback about the session. (was speaking to one of the leaders just now so thought of sending you a note directly)

A lot of folks were very excited to hear you speak and learn through the real life examples from the cricketing world. As I am talking to more people, I am getting multiple such feedback. Thank you for a very engaging and insightful session.
Thanks FocusU for enabling this very well. Appreciate your support all through the process.”

Posted on by naren@hybreed.co

Objective

To plan a virtual team building session for the Marketing team of Beiersdorf Nivea (Dubai) with the objective of team bonding and having a fun time together

Solution

The opportunity was brought to us by the Marketing Manager of the team, who reached out to us. This was a team comprising individuals who were well travelled, well read and intellectually sharp. The ask was clear – to engage this team in a manner that they also have fun together!

After exploring different options, we narrowed down to the ‘Map the City’ Challenge. This activity was chosen since it was intellectually stimulating and created an opportunity for the teams to discover a different city sitting in the comfort of their homes. The city of London was chosen, due to its many historical, famous monuments and places to visit. The virtual platform to run the session was Microsoft Teams as per the preference of the client. The activity was hence customized so as to run smoothly on it.

The key idea of the activity was to explore London by answering questions using Google Maps. The team with the maximum right answers would earn the maximum points and win the challenge

Execution of the activity:

Time – 20 mins
• At the scheduled time, participants logged in to the session via the MS Teams link
• The facilitator started the session by welcoming the participants and kicked off the session with a few fun virtual energizers!
• The group was divided into 5 teams of 4 participants each (as was pre-decided by Nivea).
• The lead facilitator then briefed the participants about the activity, along with objectives, instructions & end goals

Time – 60 mins
• Every team got 45 – 60 mins to complete the challenge.
• Every team was provided a list of questions that they had to answer in a google form shared with them. In all, there were 20 questions with 1 additional bumper question.

Time – 30 mins
• After the stipulated time for the challenge, all the teams we re-congregated.
• The Facilitator invited participants to share their experience about the session – the challenges of working together as a team virtually, while having fun together.
• The discussion was guided towards intended outcomes of team creativity, team morale in times of social distancing and working from home, team morale & team collaboration.
• The session was brought to a conclusion by announcing the winning team – the team with the highest points from the challenge
• The participants logged off with a great virtual experience and team memories to cherish.

A few points that emerged in the debrief discussion:
1. Team bonding – Participants shared that they had a good time connecting with their colleagues informally and that it was a refreshing experience.
2. Attention to detail – One participant shared that one of the main insights from the activity was the need to focus on details of a problem. “As we searched deeper in Google Maps, we got the answers.”
3. Missing the obvious – One person shared that though the clues were right in front of them, they still missed it because they were busy doing other things.
4. Helping each other – One of the behaviours that emerged was leveraging different people in a team in solving clues.
5. Fun needs to be optimally challenging – Participants enjoyed thinking, brainstorming and answering questions. They had fun playing a new game and experiencing a new online workshop together, because the difficulty level was “just right.”

Impact

Here is what Ajay Simha,Marketing Manager, Beiersdorf Nivea had to say after this workshop:

“Thank you for the great experience yesterday. Overall, I would give a rating of 9/10 and would also recommend FocusU to everyone I meet. Some qualitative feedback received from others:
– The program was very nice
– Didn’t know how the 2 hours went by
– It took our mind off work – created an #escapemoment that all of us need
– The FocusU team was very enterprising, with high passion and energy levels
– The application of zoom in and zoom out done at the end was sharp and very relevant
Thank you once again for organizing this so smoothly and helping us boost the team morale, have fun and drive engagement further. Look forward to more such sessions in the future.”

Posted on by naren@hybreed.co

Program

Consumer Healthcare Major | Engaging a large team virtually

Background

Our customer, is one of the largest players in the consumer healthcare industry. The company’s principal activities are to manufacture and distribute a wide range of healthcare foods drugs and pharmaceuticals.

The company in recent times has done remarkably well with products – that have moved from the No.10 to the No.2 slot in their category. The mood in the company was naturally upbeat. To celebrate this fresh new start as a recharged and reinvigorated organization, they had planned a kick-off on 1st April, 2020.

Objective

The objective was to keep the upbeat mood of the team going and inspire team members to hold on to their leadership mindset. A strong kick off activity was needed, to mark the occasion.

Solution

While discussing various options with the client, it was mutually agreed that it would be best if the team comes together and creates an anthem for themselves which can keep inspiring them amidst the major changes as they transitioned. And from there the agreement to do “The MusoMagic Challenge” emerged.

As we knew the “MusoMagic Challenge” then, it required the whole team and the facilitators to be present together and work closely in smaller groups to help participants in writing, singing, and dancing to produce the anthem! As we started to plan for resources, the lockdown happened!

Did we give up? No! Crisis sometimes sparks innovation like nothing else does. What emerged from our brain storming was the first-ever “Virtual MusoMagic Challenge!”

The roll-out involved different steps:

Step 1: Ideation
How do we get 250 employees virtually together to write, sing and act to create an anthem! This was like asking, “How do we eat an elephant?”, and the only answer was “one bite at a time”. We worked with an extremely supportive client to get people on a virtual platform twice – once for creating the lyrics and then for recording it. We further divided the participants into smaller groups to make each virtual session interactive, involving and fun!

Step 2: Planning & Preparation
Ideas are dime a dozen. At the end of the day, it comes down to the rigor in planning and preparation. We played out various scenarios, with some of us working as a “devil’s advocate”, challenging each one of the ideas and suggestions around execution.

Step 3: Getting our co-conspirators on board
To begin with, each day would start with client asking us, “Will this really work? Are you sure the outcome would be inspiring enough for the leadership team to bless it?” Every day, we learned to overcome our own “butterflies-in-the-stomach” to say, “Yes, we can!” Our belief came from the fact that we have always turned around even the most difficult projects successfully. Why would this be different? The fact that the client stakeholders were very supportive was the icing on the cake.

Step 4: Actual Execution
We tapped onto the client’s expectations by asking them to share some existing songs which they liked. This helped us get a cue as to what was there in their mind. From that initial point, we created the “anthem tune”, the skeleton around which the anthem would be fleshed out. Once that was done, the work with 250 participations begun!

It took three full days of working with multiple smaller groups to get them to ideate, write, sing, and act out the song in from of their computer screens!

On Day 1, just the writing happened with people writing down their “stream of consciousness”, which provided the raw material for their lyrics. Each smaller team was tasked with voting and selecting their top three lines and sharing with us. As the day ended, we had enough good lines to turn it around into an anthem lyric. We diligently worked with them translating few into Hindi to make it jazzy!

Day 2 and Day 3 was sheer hard work of working with each smaller group on the virtual platform to get their singing right, record it and make them dance to the tunes! Truth be told, it was not an easy task by any measure – staring at a screen for such long durations of time. But the energy of the participants kept us going and coming back with greater energy next day!

The final output that we created was something that we are so proud of ourselves. If we had been asked a month before we went into a lock-down, whether we could create something like this, we would have perhaps said “No!”

Impact

Here is what Sumi G, (TL&OD Manager) from the client side had to say after this workshop:

“FocusU has been a truly wonderful partner to work with and our experience in collaborating with this fabulous team has been consistently brilliant! At a critical juncture for our organization, we were hit by the onset of the pandemic requiring us to truly be agile to convert our planned engagement from a F2F format to a virtual one connecting almost 300 colleagues. The FocusU team embraced this as a challenge and their sheer efforts to develop a virtual solution that would be eventually run for the very first time in our organization – the MusoMagic challenge – are praiseworthy and actually one in a million! So thank you FocusU!”

Posted on by naren@hybreed.co

Gordon Ramsey’s globally popular reality show “24 Hours to Hell and Back” is an American reality television program. The show features Ramsay’s travels across the United States, visiting failing restaurants in his 70-foot-long “Hell On Wheels” semi-truck, which is actually a high-tech mobile kitchen, where the chefs are retrained. At first the team is sent to visit and explore the restaurant and then Ramsay goes undercover. He examines the restaurant, tries to address the issues and works to reopen the restaurant in 24 hours.

Continue reading “Leadership Lessons from Gordon Ramsey’s “To Hell And Back””