Phew and sigh,
I’ve been busy – busy facilitating team building through song, co-presenting at the ASTD International Conference and busy planning for the next event. I’m grateful for the growth our corporate event programs have seen the past couple of years but lately I’ve been missing something. What’s been missing can be described in a word; actually a bunch of words like strategic, relaxed, creative, organizational and inspired.
I preach team building but do I practice?
When we help groups create their story through song we stress the importance of taking time to reflect on the past, to celebrate the present and discuss the future. Creative time can be a powerful catalyst to change and to growth initiatives. Sooo…..I’ve had to slooowwww down… and carve out time to practice what I preach. Guess what? I’ve learned that it’s hard. When the emails are flying and the phone is ringing the doing takes over the thinking and that’s not always a great thing.
Sigh and phew,
I’ve forced myself to make time, to break time away from the day-to-day, and do some team building of my own.The first thing I realized was that my frenetic pace had compromised my efficiency and my natural ability to think strategically. So I booked time to gather my team and talk about stuff – not the next corporate team building activity or keynote speech, but the amorphous stuff like, How do we want to grow? What’s the best way to do that? How do we build in time to be innovative and continue to create the programs that got us here in the first place?
Solution
Those conversations, team building activities really, led to action steps. Scary action steps like throwing out the old website, the old logo and some other boxes we were boxed into. That was scary and yet that was fun. Now we’re staffing up. Not with paper-pushers, but with talent who understands who we are, where we’re coming from and we’re we think we’d like to go. Notice I said, ‘think’ we’d like to go. Because the key component to any innovative journey is to allow the journey to change as it unfolds.
I’m Done
No more time to blog today. My son is graduating from high school tomorrow night. This weekend, I’m taking eight incredibly talented hit songwriters with me to a fantastic team building through song event and then after a looonnnggg nap, I’m going to begin to work with our new staff member. The team builder’s team is being built.