Last week Sabre delivered pro bono team building and leadership events for two local schools involving approximately 500 kids from Grades 5 - 8. We used some of our diagnostic tools, The Kon Tiki boat building challenge and also some of our unique de-briefing techniques.
It's an absolute pleasure to see these pre teens and early teens given an opportunity to develop their team working and leadership skills. To do this in teams outside of their normal peer groups, and with experiences outside of their normal day to day curriculum, helps build to build confidence and also new social networks.
Kid's are also often able to tackle these sorts of challenges with slightly lesser amounts of the adult level ego and office politics (often found as serious impediments to good teamwork in corporate and government teams). Hopefully exposure to some relevent theory and practice around good teamwork and leadership will help them to minimise the impacts of these behaviours when they leave school and become leaders themselves?
Watching some of the quieter achievers come to the fore and shine in a new environment is also such a satisfying part of the process. Hidden talent has the chance to demonstrate the usefulness of their gifts and to shine in novel situations. It's also a lovely way to demonstrate first hand how leadership is not always about being the loudest, the most popular or indeed even the smartest. It's about being able to work with an influence others with authenticity, decency and awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses (in our humble opinion).
It is always a pleasure to work with young people and to expose them to some useful insights and experiences around effective team and leadership development.