What I learned about Leadership

September 25, 2019September 26, 2019
by Nicole Bailey

At this year’s company conference, we wanted to create an atmosphere of learning, recognition, fun and also little competition; we did this by weaving in a variety of Tribe challenges over the three days together in the Gold Coast.

At the Thursday evening welcome dinner, we broke off into pre-existing ServiceNow Tribes and provided each Tribe with a coloured bandana and the introduced the 3 challenges that the Tribes would participate in over the three-day conference in the Gold Coast. On the first morning, we sent our 100 strong participants down to the beach to compete in the first challenge:

1: LIFT AND BUILD

Teams had to find a way to get 4 individuals from point a to point b without the 4 people touching the ground when at the second point, they had to construct a structure with spaghetti and Marshmallows that would support the weight of a shoe.

2: RACE AND TUG-O-WAR

On morning 2, teams competed in retro games like egg and spoon races and of tug of war.

3: BUILD A BOAT

The final challenge took place on Saturday afternoon and required all Tribes to build and race a boat in the hotel pool.

Firstly teams had to create a war cry, and earn their equipment and tools, then build the boat, finally racing the boat across the pool to take out the competition.

WHAT I LEARNED:

Observing these teams over the three challenges was highly interesting, as the event coordinator, here’s what I learned:

Our Enablers are incredibly competitive
Everyone has a different interpretation of the same instructions
Providing clear rules is important to some people but not others
Communication was KEY to each of the winning teams
Energy is infectious
Our Enablers are crazily creative
Finally, the winning team set an intention to win

THE WINNING TEAM’S STRATEGY:

I interviewed the winning team leader, Suzanne Gerrard, from the Customer Success Tribe about their strategies to win the tribe challenges. She mentioned that it was not by accident that the team won. “Our team set out with an intention to win,” I asked her how, “On the welcome night of the conference, we received our team allocations, and set about learning each other strengths, skills and communication styles, we agreed that as a team we could win, and win we did.

“It was important to know when we should step up to a challenge and when we needed to step back and offer support, working with our strengths was vital to winning. We spent time during every challenge encouraging each other, offering kind words and cheering each on to keep our spirits high.”

Suzanne added “On the final day, we had already tested our strategy on two other beach challenges, we knew what was working and how to adjust if it wasn’t, we knew what each person was great at doing and when we each needed to step up to the plate. The final challenge was to build a boat, before any design work was started we decided a tactic for this final challenge and set about the work dividing to conquer; some people as builders, some as engineers, others on the tools, cutting cardboard, tape and plastic sheeting as required, we also knew who would race the boats in the end, being strategic to choose an anchor at the back and a lighter rower at the front to keep the boat going as fast as we could.”

She mentioned, “I knew we would win because as a team we set an intention to win, everyone was committed to the same goal, all team members provided support based on their own strengths to reach the same goal and most of all we supported each other, true teamwork.”