Survivor

(This is the Broad award won by the HISD a couple of years ago. They are up for the award again this year)

Well I am in the last day of the 3rd week of 'all together' training for the EPP, better known as survivor. You'll be glad to know that I have not been kicked, nor taken myself off, the island ;-)

Seriously this Executive Potential Program is tough stuff but really really worth it I think. This was the week of visiting different business entities in the city of Houston. So we were put on new teams which met for the first time Sunday night (11 of us).

On Monday we had some training in the morning and then in the afternoon, we met together as a team to select a leader, decide who was going to do what on the visit, what questions we were going to ask to make sure that we got the material we needed to meet our deliverables- a 45 minute powerpoint presentation, a 5-7 page paper, and a thank you letter to the entity that we visited.

You would think that would be a somewhat easy task, but when you have 11 Type A personalities, all either very strong leaders or with leadership potential, the challenge becomes letting one person lead...i.e. too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the soup.

We we finally divided up the responsibilities and who would do what for our deliverables and got ready for our visit to the Houston Independent School District(HISD) on Tuesday morning.

What a really wonderful visit we all had - that we agreed on! If I had young children I would seriously consider moving to Houston to put them in one of their schools. There goal is to be the "choice in education" for all residents of Houston and they are taking very bold and innovative steps to reach this goal.

Anyway I have lots more details for anyone interested in hearing about the visit.

But now the hard part began. Two people 'volunteered' to take all of our notes and compile them into the beginning of a paper. Then 3 folks 'volunteered' to take that document and edit it to turn it into our final paper. There was one thing that we ALL agreed on.... we did not want to leave Houston with any of the deliverables from this project hanging over any of our heads! The rest of us were involved in putting together the powerpoint presentation and then delivering it to our fellow EPPers. To say the least Wednesday was a very stressful day, as everyone had lots of opinions about how to do every little piece of each deliverable, including the thank you letter that I wrote, which although folks said "just write it" then went through 4 revisions before it was sent (including a minor discussion about commas- it seems there is a fairly evenly divided camp about where and when they are needed.... imagine that :-) ) But it is good to have lots of eyes always on a document.

We made it through Wednesday (barely) and then faced a new day of decisions on Thursday. There are some really great presenters on my team and we all had some really good, but different ideas about how we should sit as a team and how the room should be arranged for the presentation. Doesn't this all seem so petty!!!!- believe me it is easy to focus on this minutia during the process and really hard to keep your focus on the real objectives.

Well that was the deliverable that meant the most to me.... the unstated and intangible one and really the only one that will mean anything to any of us 5-10 years from now - How to build and maintain a team to accomplish a specific task. The task is really secondary to the building the cohesiveness of the team. Every little contribution is important from body language and sighing, to carefully chosen words to build instead of tearing down, and choosing which battles to fight and how important they are. Although all decisions are not important, when one person starts making all of them without buy in from others, then the decision becomes to depose the dictator... and I am afraid that is an important decision.

Anyway all in all we did very well, I learned lots of team building skills and the visit to HISD was definitely a highlight of the "Good to Great" business model experience.