Caring and Sharing Teams Insead – Senior Management Development Programme

This article is available at QuaSyLaTic Knowledgebase

A group of 23 senior managers undergo a 3-week-stay-in MBA-like management training with lecturers / professors from Insead, France.

One of the off-the-class-room programs is to expose the managers to the community service. A list of homes, or institutions where needy people stay were given to them to choose for their projects. Five teams were formed.

During the first facilitated session for half a day, the group brainstormed and formulated their criteria & attributes of high performance team. During the first week, these teams had their own meetings to formulate plan to be shared at the end of the first week.

After sharing of their plan, they will proceed to implement the plan in the following week, and share their undertaking in a whole group. These slides show the facilitation techniques and questions used during the sharing of their plan.

The key test is to have all members (not just leader of the team) to share their consistent story and having other members to challenge their mental models and belief system.

The objectives of the sharing sessions were given to the managers. However, most of them were disappointed during the facilitated session as they were having the usual mindset of making presentation and followed by question and answers. Such approach seldom helps challenge one’s underlying thinking and cannot involve everyone participation. However, the senior managers, obviously, are not comfortable with the new approach to have their thinking and strategies challenged!

After the challenging and reflection session, the senior managers were encouraged to further network and synergize among themselves to further increase their capacity and capability with larger visions, strategies to implement their projects in the following week.

At the end of the third week, they are to share in a big group their work. After the usual presentation, they were given half an hour group reflection time without any facilitation this time.

Interestingly although they complained about too much facilitation earlier, they felt lost about how to go about the half and hour open-space reflection time. For the first 10-15 mins., they cluster again in their own small project team without interacting with each other, hence no synergy creation (one of the important attribute they defined for high performance team). Only prompted by this QuaSyLaTic facilitator, one of them volunteered to act as internal facilitator to get the rest of the group to share their reflection. From this little exercise, it further demonstrates the importance of the ability of individuals and all team members to develop capacity and skills to co-create and learn together, so as to create the results they all sincerely desire.

This is not happening. From the project presentation there is little synergy creation among the five teams. It is obvious that certain “homes” do not really need financial help, others need badly. But there is little or no sharing of resources among the fives teams, although each team is given a budget of RM 500.

When managers develop skills to help all members to increase collective capacity and intelligence to co-create the greater visions they believe in, they could effect synergetic results to the whole organization. Otherwise organization members will be like the senior

managers, operating in their departmental cocoons, like the five teams, each focusing on the “home” assignment.