Positive Collaboration

For the first Meetup® Event from the Switzerland community of experts, on Wednesday, 3rd March 2021, they decided to concentrate on Positive Collaboration. In order to ensure this, the event was presented by Maria Cortes Astudillo and Luisa Colombo, Agile Coach in Switzerland and Trainers.

The goal of this session is to experience some tools to help teams to embrace creativity perform.

Agility is a horizontal approach to work; when we talk about horizontality, it implies that all people are treated with respect and dignity. The responsibilities and roles of the different members of a team are not the same, but what is identical is the respect and dignity with which everyone is treated. This horizontality allows the liberation of human capital in the company. Adopting this approach can be complicated, thus, to work in a more horizontal way, teams need collaboration tools.

These tools must meet the following two criteria: develop effective listening skills and allow everyone to express their ideas and needs, with respect for others.

Based on Adlerian psychology, Empowering People in the Workplace (EPW) program is focused on the basic desire of all people — to belong and feel significant (Maslow pyramid level 3). EPW activities will help participants to develop their emotional intelligence to create or improve their team performance fulfilling the other team members and their own personal need of belonging and significance.

All employees deserve to spend their work lives in respectful, collaborative and productive organizations. At the end of this session, participants will have systems and tools to achieve this.

So, the speakers used the team meeting process to effectively solve problems and create connections. In fact the workshops were interactive and productive as she used role-play to make participants go through the feeling-thinking-decision cycle.

Firstly, there was an icebreaker where all participants listed words that they associated with "management", first each for himself and with the objective of finding 15 in 30s, then collaboratively. After a brief sharing on this exercise, Maria and Luisa described this workshop: Animal kingdom. The group was split into 4 teams: Lions, Elephants, Turtles and Eagles. Each team had to list the reasons why they liked being that animal, and why on the other hand they wouldn't like being the other three animals.

Then they shared their visions and exchanged on what we could take out from this exercise for a professional situation. The benefit of this presentation was to propose exercises that could immediately be implemented into team meetings and improve performance and creativity skills.

Maria and Luisa emphasized experiential activities based on positive collaboration to inspire the change in work teams.

See you soon for the next Comet' by Extia Switzerland event. Until then, don't hesitate to follow us on our Twitter page @CometByExtia