Tag Archives: Leadership

Evaluation

Fluency

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Get a group of 20 up-and-coming leaders and lead them! Great. What an assessment! How to lead your peers? In a country you have never been before? In a place you have never visited?

This is sometimes the hardest group to lead, the people around you, I was not the only one amongst the group feeling this way. This I believe looks very different from leading students, which we as up-an-coming teachers have learnt about in our university studies. Putting this into play and taking the approach of a facilitator; a ‘neutral person’ managing the group processes, (Thomas, 2010, p.240) rather than leader; a person who leads, commands or organises a group, looked different from what I first expected (Cross, 2015).

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Discoveries, Evaluation, Reflections

Dont cry because its over, smile because it happened

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“Don’t CRY because its over, SMILE because it happened!” (Unknown, n.d.)

I know what your thinking… doesn’t he normally start off with a Dr Seuss quote? Some of you may even be thinking ‘that is a Dr Seuss 77292741_ec5b47243b_oquote…’ but heres the thing, it’s not. In fact he never wrote this at all. It has simply been associated with him due to the fact it sounds like something he would write, an assumption. My old man used to tell me that you should never ‘assume’ anything. His reasoning for this was that ‘it makes an ass out of you and me‘ and in my experience these words have held true.

Assuming that you know how other people think, what they want, how they will react. That your plan is flawless or even the assumption that because you know all of these things.. nothing could go wrong. Your being an ass, and you are wrong, but we all do it.

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Evaluation

Lifelong Leaders and Learners…

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The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humour, but without folly.
Hello, how are you today? That’s good, I’m well to ~ Jim Rohn ~

Facilitation is an art; there is not doubt about that. It is unique to each individual and is something that changes and flows with the situation you are in…or at least that’s the general idea.

When I sit back and look at the 22 other outdoor edders that I went to Singapore with, I can see the differences in their facilitation styles – each is unique in it’s own way. So what happens when you combine each of these unique styles into groups? Chaos? Harmony? Compromise? Based on experiences in Singapore…all of these things.

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Evaluation

A new experience, a new skill.

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Leadership! Facilitation! What a pair of confusing, challenging and questionable topics. I have searched far an wide, through huge body’s of literature, and I could tell you that..

‘Leadership is the ability to guide others without force into a direction or decision that leaves them still feeling empowered and accomplished’ (Sessoms & Stevenson, 1981).

Or I could tell you that..

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Reflections

‘Team work divides the task and multiplies the success’

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This heading best relates to how my facilitation group and I reflected about how successful we were during our facilitation day to the Singapore Botanical Gardens and the Night Safari.  P1030453-min

Planning

Right from the start we were a solid unit, the delegation of tasks were efficient and easy. However as the preparation time of the trip began to run out, it was evident that the end of semester work and commitments had caught up to us all.

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Reflections

Time poor in heavy traffic

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Having two half days of facilitation had its pros and cons. Pro we didn’t have to concentrate for a long period of time. Con we were rushed at times to make the second half of the day. During the second half of our facilitation it was very much about people management as the group was fatiguing from a long few weeks. The challenges we faced and elements we did well were:

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Reflections

The Ups, The Downs, The Hard Work and Refined Planning…Did It All Pay Off?

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Facilitating a group of your peers was never going to be an easy task, especially when you are in another country and visiting a place in which you have never been before. Nevertheless, this was the challenge that we faced today as we facilitated the groups’ exploration of the Green Corridor and Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.

The key of persistence opens all doors locked by resistance…       ~ John Di Lemme ~

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Reflections

The day the plan went out the window…

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Time. Planning. Itinerary. Location. These are all words which my group and I were all too familiar with throughout the weeks of planning our facilitation day. On Sunday however, our first day in Singapore, all these words just went out the window. Being in a new and unfamiliar country, everything we had planned took MUCH longer. It was 8am on Sunday morning when we were standing around without food for breakfast that we came to realise this. This was when we said: Goodbye itinerary! Goodbye carefully planned departure and arrival times! And lastly, goodbye to some of the locations and activities we had planned to do. But we knew this would happen right…?

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