h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I did a two day workshop yesterday and the day before, and had previously done a 360 Degree Feedback excercise (boss, 6 colleagues and 6 direct reports) and filled out a Facet 5 profile (a psychometric test).

We had an excercise where we had to build something in small teams, with each team contributing to a greater whole. Very interesting excercise. It was also meant to be a competition.

We found ourselves making sure that everything was structurally sound so that other group's structures had a good foundation. We also found that all of us were on the low in confrontation skills. Interestingly, I went head-to-head with another team member and got to a stalemate with him. Both I and the facilitator thought that he was being dismissive and belittling, however, it turned out that he scored lower at confrontation that I did, so he was protecting himself by backing off, and he used unfortunate body language to do it.

Apparently, my Facet 5 showed me to be a 'facilitator' type, which fitted with what I thought it was going to be.

My 360 Degree showed that my team felt I performed worst at dealing with poor performance. Interesting that a couple of them have complained to me about colleagues letting them down, but then said, 'I don't want you to do anything about it'. That's just dumping and is very frustrating. It happened previously with members of the team who have since left. They couldn't deal with the issue themselves or face 'the atmosphere' in the office if I were to deal with it, as the person they were complaining about would know it was them. Well, now that it's been raised in this way, I can deal with it without breaking confidences.

In my feedback, the facilitator told me that he'd witnessed me coming up with great ideas for how to progress the project, but that I'd backed down, when he thought it would have been better to have been more insistant. For instance, no-one wanted to do any brainstorming, or thinking about what questions we should be asking.

So my big thing from this is going to be learning to be more confrontational and being comfortable with it. It's going to be an interesting learning curve.

So the other thing that came out of it was how to deal with a team that is lacking in a vital area, or even more than one, although I didn't deal with it at the time during my feedback session as I was extremely tired. I really needed a period of reflection to be able to make the most of my feedback session.

The workshop was organised by your workplace?

It sounds very productive. Do you think your colleagues will learn from it, too?

Hey, Z, I hope you write an entry about the experience, perhaps even tune it to the EG!

It would be massively useful for more people to take these ideas back to their workplace. I feel it would raise both professionalism and productivity to have a more structured workshop helping people to assess their strong and weak points.

Meanwhile, if you find that confrontation still bothers you, you could always turn to a more negotiative style to get similar, if not better, results than those generally generated by confrontation.

Roger Dawson has an incredibly useful set of materials on "The Power of Super Negotiating" (I think that's it. I sometimes get a couple of the words transposed.)

Great luck to you,

Hi TC,

Yes, the training was organised by my workplace. Not sure if it will be rolled out to all staff as it was incredibly expensive I'm told - I think it was GDP1000 per person - actually, I suppose that's nothing in the business world, but a sizeable investment for local government. Do I think that colleagues will learn from it? Difficult to say. They all filled in the questionnaire and may have made the connection from the questions to their own performance, however I'm not sure how many would have wondered how they would have stacked up to that being done for them. My direct reports were the lowest scoring group of all, however I'm fairly confident that that was due to one or maybe two people marking consistently low. That group showed the most wide variation, often from low to top mark in the same question.

Hi Fords,

Mmm, I hadn't thought of writing an entry. I might once I've integrated the learning. On the subject of confrontation, one of the things that was said to me during the activity was 'Don't back down!' and he later told me that if I'd pursued a couple of things, the group would have been more productive. For instance, I tried to get the group to brainstorm the sorts of questions we would need to ask about our task and no-one was keen to do it. So I'm not meaning confrontation in an argumentative kind of way. What I need to develop are open questions to draw people out more on their thinking on the issues. I'm told that a lot of people don't really like being made to think and will engage in a lot of short-cut thinking and I wanted us to be more rigorous. It's an issues for me with my team too.

Do you have a link to Roger Dawson's "The Power of Super Negotiating"?

Aha! http://www.rdawson.com/

How fascinating dear ZSF

I had wondered where you had got to!

I would love to do such a test. all I know is that , in my old age, I really do believe that my "strengths"(?) of my youth i.e. dtermination, somewhat of a perfectionist, hard worker,total committment to justice, are becoming more those of an angry old lady!!. I say in my defence that at school, even thought I was not the captain of hockey, if ever the sports mistress went off, she would hand me the whistle. I was always embarassed and wondered why she did it. I am dimly realising it that she marybe thought I was a fair person.
Ah me!! Ah my!!

As to the cost of your course. Last year K. and I attended an International Cognitive Behaviour Conference at the University of Canterbury. One day at the workshop cost each of us £150 .00 I seem to remember. It was so worth while, but on the other hand I have no spare cash to continue and we have to continue on our own, because the local authorities will not recommend K. to such therapy and I cannot afford to pay for it. !! there is some exaggerration there of fees I imagine.

I hope that over Christmas and the New Year we might be able to celebrate together with my darling little

Much affection

Christiane

Hi Christiane,

I think your old sports mistress knew a thing or two!

There are some really interesting tests out there. Let me see if I can get you some links. Myers Briggs and the Enneagram are interesting. http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htmhttp://www.enneagraminstitute.com

See what you think. I am an ENPF on the Myers-Briggs (Champion Idealist) and a tyle 7 Enthusiast on the Enneagram. I think that both of these are free. If not, let me know and I'll find you some more.

What were you doing up at 4.05am the other day?

Oops, I just remembered that I had't replied to your invitation to come and see you around Christmas/New Year, Christiane!

I'm intending going to see my parents on the Isle of Wight before Christmas - dad says he's not up to travelling at the moment - he's got two operations coming up - one for a cateract and another for a hernia, poor thing.

Does your phone work properly now? I'll give you a call when I know when I'm not here.

On the subject of the 360 interview and the Facet 5, I've spoken with some of th people on the course, and then the organiser and she's agreed to organise a follow-up day so that we can reflect back our experiences and how it's helped (or if it hasn't how we can make plans to tackle any problem areas). And I've noticed that I'm being a bit more assertive and feel more confident in myself.

We're having a follop up meeting next Monday. I met with someone to discuss how I could be more aware of the political implications of things I do with my team - one of the feedback points from my 360 - and it was really helpful. I suggested to the organiser that we had a follow up session and she organised it so that I could attend.

I'm doing an 'Assertion for Managers' course. It will be interesting to see if I can get space between being on the receiving end of behaviour and getting some space between stimulus and response.