Me realizing the power of a Team!

Through our first MBA team presentation!

Our MBA class in the last 2 weekends went through a roller coaster ride in the High Performing Teams course conducted by the fantastic Virginia Morris.

My team with lovely Virginia in the center :)

It was enlightening, enriching also mentally and physically exhausting; by the time we came to the end of our course, we found it completely rewarding.

After gaining so much knowledge from the course, the best way to gain wisdom from all our learnings was to implement it, and we got that chance yesterday. We were divided into teams and asked to work on a team charter and a case study.

Team charter: It is a document that the team works together to craft out operating guidelines and principles to achieve a common goal.

The task was to work on a team charter that would help our team accomplish our MBA journey. We got to witness so many impressive, creative, and thought-provoking presentations from all the teams. For example:

Team Charter, which helped them take their company IPO

Team Blender, which recognized the power of diversity

Team Avengers — ready to face all the challenges with a strong team spirit

And many more….

We presented our team charter by being a consultant for a Bank, here is a preview of our team charter:

Some key things that I learned while working on the team charter:

1. Many ideas will be on the table; it’s essential to find a mechanism to pick one idea and get started.
2. Divide the task and set timeliness
3. Have a tool to keep track of the presentation slide updates
4. Appoint a leader who can lead the show
5. Rehearse for your Presentation.
6. Make your presentation visually appealing with less content
7. It does not matter who is in the team, the chemistry of the team matter.

Critical Insights from all the team presentations:

1. Set realistic expectations in the charter
2. Have a metric to track efforts and not just results
3. Getting everyone on the same page is difficult and important
4. There is no perfect charter; it has to be dynamic

Next up was solving a case study; what else should I expect? We are doing an MBA, after all :-) We are always ready for challenges! Resolve a case study in 20 mins and present it to the call.

Yes Mam!!!!

These are some steps you can follow while working on a case study:

1. Do a deep case analysis
2. Set the context and define the problem well.
3. Present evidence-based research
4. Back your recommendation and point of view with data.

If you have an idea, use this template to pitch to your boss.

Virginia said, “Influence is power, and knowledge is powerful.” Hence we used all the knowledge we gained from this course, implemented it smartly to solve our case study, and delivered it on the stage like a pro, and we WON.

We gained so much knowledge from the course; we felt as if we got wings to fly as high as we want and we all flew so high as a team, and that felt empowering!!!

As I got back to work today, guess what? I look at my team much differently than I did before. Learn from each other, grow, inspire and have fun while we step by step achieve our goals.

My classmates :)