Monday March 18th

Hi I’m Dave I’ll be your blogger for last week. It was a bumper week for us as a group. Let’s go back to the beginning or in this case last Monday. 

After the first finance test of the year on Monday night the seven of us piled into our various vehicles and made the treacherous trip over the mountain. Our destination was Ian and Ali Corbett’s home for some conflict resolution... and pizza. There was a lot of unhappiness about how people were working or not working. Some of the group felt marginalized, others felt unappreciated and closed out. I think it’s fair to say that our team dynamic was a bit of a shambles and If we didn’t sort things out quickly our group was going to start falling apart. 

All Fall Down

 Ian and Ali gave us a safe setting in which to discuss these issues, as well as a few other things that we need to be mindful of for this year. Here is a list of things we talked about.

•   I vs We, breaking patterns of negative behaviour
•  Negativity and listening to others point of view vs the need to be right
•  Interacting positively
• Being careful not to close people out – letting people finish their thought process/sentence
• The different ways that people process information
• Trying to grow trust
• Not laying blame and finding fault, we need to achieve things as a team thus if someone makes a mistake it’s not just their mistake, it’s the teams mistake.
• Avoiding micro management, there just isn’t time for it
• Support each other on tasks
• Plan to finish tasks early giving us a little time to polish
• Lighten up, don’t take things personally when discussions get heated
• Setting agendas and objectives for meetings
• Setting expectations for group members
• Assigning champions for projects
• Building a time line for upcoming projects and deadlines

 I think everyone came to realise by the end that we are all capable people who want to contribute as much as we can to this program. We each have skills and value to add even if we do it in different ways. Sometimes we need to accept that there are many paths to success and the way we see is not the only or even the best way to achieve our goals. We all need to make an effort to communicate more openly about specific issues. As individuals we need to step up and take on tasks even if they make us uncomfortable or if we fear we might fail at them.  Failure is a very good way to learn and grow. Have a look at some of the notes from the evening, best of luck making sense of them. I think you really had to be there....