Mr. K Manivannan General Manager, Sundaram Finances, visited us in ASB on 26th July '06. He took a workshop on “Team Building and Leadership Skills.” He started off by saying, ‘leadership is as old as civilization itself.’ By giving examples from a Persian king to a small farmer, he explained that leadership was all pervasive. The role of leadership today is especially important as the world is more dynamic than ever … and people believe, ‘if you win all of us win and vice versa.’
After this initial briefing, he gave us a forty-five minute long presentation on TEAMS. He explained in great length as to what a team is, team dynamics, members of a team and so on…but the best part was how he compared the behavioral traits of group members with the members of our animal kingdom. For example, a member who boasts around is like a peacock, a member who is stubborn is like an elephant and so-on, but at the end of it we were left wondering which animal we resembled to!!!!!!! It is very important today to know who we truly are because there is a wide gap between, ‘what we think we are, what others think we are, and what we really are.’ So for a good team, the first step is to know yourself. To help us a little in this process, Mr. Manivannan gave us a mnemonic DISC, which simply is Dominance, Inducement, Steadiness and Compliance. He said all of us are a blend of the above four broad characteristics. It is upto us to identify our mix.
Well, by now we all had a fair idea of what a team was and how it worked, so Mr. Manivannan divided all of us into teams and made us play three different games. They were lot of fun, but in the end we realized that they though the games were different they had a common ground, that is only the team which carried all its members together towards the common objective succeeded. In simple words in a team what matters is not the individual goals but the goals of the team, and how one aligns or sacrifices his/her interests for the team. This step-by-step learning of team mechanics (from theory to practical) was a lovely experience.
What came next was a wonderful surprise - Mr. Manivannan played a few clips of the Hindi movie “Lagaan”. We were wondering –What does a movie have to do with the workshop…but the answer came soon. He said, people exhibit team-building and leadership skills all around us, some do it knowingly, and others do it unknowingly. In the movie too the hero Aamir Khan displayed both of the above excellently. This was one of the best ways in which I learnt a topic. This workshop went on for three hours just like a Hindi movie… well we did watch a movie, played games, saw a presentation, and lots and lots of fun.
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