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AITP
Mission Impossible
Accomplished
AITP Dallas Hosts 74 Professionals at Team
Building Workshop
At Culminis, we
encourage user group leaders and members to be
involved, and we found one group in particular
that went out of their way to accomplish that
mission. That group,
AITP Dallas Chapter, arranged for quite an
interesting event.
September 17, 2004
Deborah Lovell
 AITP
Dallas featured “Operation Team Building,
Delivering Human Performance Improvement” as its
fall professional development workshop for
members and guests on Wednesday, September 15,
2004 at the Hotel Intercontinental Malachite
Showroom in Addison, TX. The 74 attendees were
professionals from several companies throughout
the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex.
The evening
workshop was led by Chapter President, Deborah
Lovell, and co-facilitated by David Estes, CEO
of Tactical Tanks, a training facility for
strategic leadership & team building learning.
Keeping in the theme of this “military-style”
training, the Chapter Board members were dressed
in BDUs (battle dress uniforms) graciously
donated by Tactical Tanks. And forget the
traditional hotel ballroom type seminar;
Commander Estes brought not only his unique
training expertise to the workshop but also his
5 ton tank! Yes, a real British tank.
“We hosted this
workshop because we know how important it is as
a professional in today’s workplace to be a team
player and the importance of communicating with
your team members to be successful in your
company mission.”
said Deborah R.
Lovell, President of the AITP Dallas
Chapter, “And, while we have the right
tactical hard skills, many of us know our
leadership and management skills are a bit
rusty.”
The workshop
consisted of two interactive exercises with each
team being assigned a military division name.
Once the crew members of each team elected their
commander (executive), navigator (manager) and
driver (team leader), mission orders were
delivered and the crews (frontline) set out to
accomplish their missions and report back to
Central Command their success. During the
“debriefing” segment, our attendees defined how
difficult their assignment was and what went
wrong in the communication directives. They
learned how mission critical it is to
communicate clearly and concisely from executive
to management to frontline level.
The attendees
reported the workshop as “Mission Accomplished”.
“This was a great team building workshop”,
said attendee Doug Arnold, IT Consultant,
“and as a former Army officer, I thought the
military lingo used in the mission orders the
Commanders were given would be easy for me to
interpret and communicate to my tank crew. When
my team didn’t understand what I was saying, I
knew we were possibly not going to complete the
mission. I learned a valuable lesson in that
when working with my team on a project from now
on, I need to communicate in lingo they
understand so we can reach our goal as a team.”
The attendees
went home with essential team building tips to
immediately put into action in both their
professional and personal lives, along with
their very own tank! No, not the real 5-ton
tank, but AITP Dallas did provide each attendee
a toy tank.
The AITP Dallas Chapter regular meetings are
held on the third Wednesday of every month at
the Hotel Intercontinental at 15201 Dallas
Parkway, Addison, TX. To find out more
information on upcoming events, please visit
our
website.
About AITP Dallas
The purpose of
AITP Dallas is to engage in education focused on
the development of effective programs for the
self-improvement of its membership and guests.
AITP encourages high standards of competence and
promotes professional attitudes among its
members. The AITP Dallas Chapter is comprised of
local executive leaders, project managers,
developers, product specialists, and students
from UTD, UTA, ITT, DeVry, Midwestern State
University and Tarleton State University. |