Your Mission

Co-ordinate 17 Outdoor Education students to attend two tours at the Singapore Botanic Gardens (SBG) and to explore the Night Safari Park (NSP)

Ensure that there is learning occurring and work well with your 3 teammates.

Sounds easy enough? Until it actually comes to the day of facilitating and you realise that you are a ruthless, task-driven individual. This means that I will not rest, sleep or eat until the mission that I have been tasked with is complete. I’ll admit, sometimes this is great. When I can use this trait of mine positively I can contribute a lot to a group in the way of focus, delegation and feedback. Unfortunately for my group on the day of our facilitation, I was unable to do so and I instead became the task-crazed woman of your nightmares.

Let me explain. I felt as though I had a really clear idea of how the day was going to run, because I put the bits and pieces of work that the team had completed into one document. What I mean is that each person understood their own section; timeline, transport, aims etc. But not everyone understood how the day looked as a whole. This could have been easily fixed by taking the time to sit down with each other to look at how the whole day was going to run, and to delegate who would be doing what at each point of the day. Rather than one person being responsible for one section, we all needed to be responsible for the whole day.

When it came to giving the group instructions, it was easier for me to give the instructions rather than to explain the instructions to one of my teammates, who would then tell the group. In my mind this would have been completely inefficient because I am solely focused on completing the task. Ultimately meaning that I was that overpowering and controlling figure of the group.

So what does all this mean in terms of facilitating better? I think for myself it boils down to remembering that getting the work done might be my goal, but there are others in the team who have things they would like to achieve too. I will always be task oriented, it’s in my nature, but I believe that I can become better at working with others of differing leadership styles. Learning to be more people orientated will be difficult for me, but I know that this needs to happen before I can go into a real world environment and facilitate classes and camps with other leaders. This is not only important in order to work with others, but also very important for my future students who will need a balance of these two leadership styles (p12). And hey, I’m task driven so if I put my mind to it I have to achieve it!

As a reader of this post, please don’t think that the day was terrible. We did a lot of things well, despite facilitating a group of exhausted students. It was difficult at times to keep the group morale up, but with a little help from processed sugar and some words of empathy I think we were able to help.

I also believe that the group learnt something from this day, and did exceptionally well to listen so attentively to two tours. It’s not that the day didn’t go to plan, just that the plan seemed to be understood differently by everybody.

Thanks to my team for being so understanding about my desire to get tasks completed. You have taught me that this is not always the most important thing and I look forward to developing my skills in planning and communicating with a diverse group of people.

Sincerely,

A task crazed individual.