Solution

The team had a new leader who had moved in recently. He had also recruited many of the leadership team members recently. As this new team was coming together at the start of a new journey, there was a need for the team to know and understand each other better in order to synergize for producing better results.

Working closely with the HR Business Partner we decided on a few things:
1) While this was a very important intervention for the team, they did not want this to be done in a very serious tenor. “Fun at work” was after all, one of their core values!
2) The session had to give the participants a tangible language by which they could better interface with each other’s strengths and differences.

Basis these two key inputs, we decided to anchor the workshop design around a psychometric tool. The tool of choice was Emergenetics, since it was something that participants could very easily relate to and its colour coding gave a language which everyone could easily adopt even after the workshop. One other very tangible benefit that Emergenetics has over other psychometric tools is that, post the workshop – all the learning and insights are captured in the form of a very handy app that each participant could always refer to. Participants could also use the app for a quick understanding of how their preferences would play out against the dynamic of another person in the team.

The workshop itself was conducted in a signature FocusU style of leveraging the Kolb’s Experiential methodology. This meant that the intense discussions about preferences, behaviors and thinking styles were punctuated with activities that were light and yet powerful enough to be used as props for the debriefs.

In the many times that we have run New Leader Assimilation workshops, we have often also run a very interesting activity called the Hot Seat, that gives the team members a much deeper insight into the personality of the leader. It also helps builds bridges between the leader and his team – since it brings out the human angle to the person behind the persona too.

Impact:

This is what the leader Rajeev Nagi (The Managing Director of Teleflex India) had to say about the intervention:

“At the very outset, I would like to thank Focus on behalf of my management team for having organised a memorable team-building program for the Teleflex India management team, and for our senior leadership team.

As the leadership team of a fast paced medical devices company in India, we have an arduous, and at the same time- an immensely enjoyable challenge, of consistently out-performing the industry in India by a significant degree. In parallel, we have to ensure that the task of organisation and culture building continues, given our long history of having existed in India as a rather ‘placid’ joint venture company where any kind of change was an exception! Put both together, and you have the perfect situation of an organisation that really needs change management, and needs to build a team that works closely together with high levels of synergies.

While team building is a long journey for any organisation that wants to pursue it in letter and in spirit, what team FocusU managed to achieve in a day for us was to act like a ‘catalyst’. You managed to run a deft script designed to make us think, understand ourselves better- as individuals, and as a collective, and helped us understand our individual and collective inflexion points that would help unlock our untapped potentials. All this- in a day’s work!

Thanks once again for organising a workshop high on energy, and the ‘fun’ quotient: It resonated very well with our core value of ‘Fun at work’!”