Heading Home....

After a week away in Canada, I'm finally heading home. I'll board my flight shortly. I had a great time, met some awesome people and I learned a lot. I was in Canada for Management Leadership Training and I learned a lot about myself and how best to communicate and work with others. Looking forward to putting what I learned into practice.

This afternoon, we had an awesome exercise/simulation. There were 25 of us and we were divided into groups of four, with a white envelopes on each table. We were told that we had a client that wanted to see 5 different models of airplanes for purchase. We needed 12 inch and 9 inch models that had to fly 16 feet in the air and given a finite set of resources to make the paper airplanes. As an entire group, we had to produce 5 planes for the client within 20 minutes.

Oh shit went through my head. We divided responsibilities and I opted to demonstrate the final product. One of my group members came up with the brilliant idea for all of us to collaborate together and instead of 4 different groups, we had one group and everyone played their roles. I kept time and when they couldn't get them to fly the 16 feet, I could see that they needed weight and suggested they use the Popsicle sticks and then they flew a longer distance. We had these colorful pipe cleaners and feathers so I suggested that we use those to extend the wings to 12 inches to meet the 12 inch parameters when we had 9 inch paper. That worked as well. I was just appreciative that they listened to my ideas to improve their designs to meet the goal. I admit that I had to stay in my non-paper plane making lane but I came up with some solutions that helped us reach the goal. Afterwards, we were told that we were the best and funnest class yet to work with for training and the only class in the history of the program to decide to work together and only have to produce 5 models with 2 backups as opposed to 5 models per group. In the real world, we saved the Bank a lot of money being efficient. Kudos to my teammate for that idea!!!!

I'm just ready to go home and be around my family and friends. Priceless!