Magazine
Participant Perspective: a Reflection on the General Management Plus Program Published on October 01, 2019
A field report by Marianne Ohm, Managing Partner of codiviti UG and participant in the 6th General Management Plus Program.
During module 2 of the GMP+ Program, the program participants and the local team of the learning center met virtually to reflect on the first months working together and define how to go on. The following part will outline the second module from the participant perspective, how it was conducted and how it helped the team grow.
Yesterday, the whole team came together on Zoom – our virtual communication system. We were located all around the world, but virtually connected through in a video conference. The whole team means that there were 15 people in the call which can be very challenging. Two of our coaches were with us and guided us through the module. The week before, we had also done a great job on setting up a schedule for the topics we had decided to talk about. This helped a lot.
Since I have never worked in a virtually connected team, the GMP+ Program helped me to get a better understanding of how to handle such situations well. Reflecting on the past months since the kickoff, we all agreed that we would have to improve our communication and collaboration to make the team work together better. We gathered everyone’s opinion (yes, of all 13) on what had worked well and what we wanted to change concerning our past teamwork. One of the most difficult challenges was to get every team member to attend the calls on a regular basis. Thus, one of our main goals was to get “the big call” at least once a month scheduled. Another important part of Module 2 was to set up teams and assign them to one or two business units.
Looking back, it took a lot of effort to check updates like call minutes, recordings, comments and e-mails in our collaboration and communication tools. Some weeks, I had invested 15 hours, in other weeks only 4 hours into our business impact project. Working for the purpose of good education is always a great motivator and I had the feeling all participants tried to do as much as possible for this great purpose. The challenge for oneself is to stay up to date, to be involved but still use the full team power and manage your time well.
Concluding, Module 2 was a true motivation boost for our project. I felt a new team spirit with the local team from Sri Lanka. I enjoyed seeing that we were all really trying to make this work, even though it was not easy to have everyone on track and understand each other’s behavior coming from different cultures and work environments. With our newly setup rules and teams, we were able to make important decisions regarding our project, create our business plan and pitch it to an investor.
Marianne Ohm is 27 years old and has been into various fields of voluntary work for almost 10 years. She is CEO of codiviti UG and regularly gives lectures on topics such as future skills and programming. Her hobbies are meetups, reading, crafting and strength training.