Team Training for Leadership
During the last ten years the “human factor” (that is, acknowledgement of the emotional level) has also gained in consideration in the industrial sector. Emotions, naturally, have a direct influence on achievement as well. It is now acknowledged that a well-functioning team does not hesitate to address conflict and is practised in discussing problems and issues.
We often work with the OH cards in seminars and workshops. Spreading them out on the floor so that everyone can see them, we try to home in on an emotional quality in the participants by asking them each to select a card which corresponds approximately to their feelings at that moment in their current situation. A question at any seminar, for example, could be, “With what feelings did I come here today?” The OH cards present many possibilities in answer to such a question. The associative cards function as a catalyst both for communication and for the experience of closeness among the participants. This feeling of closeness is important because the success of our work as trainers is dependent on the participants opening up during the three or four days they are together – that is, that they reveal themselves more readily than they might in a normal, more formal situation.
Our workshop and seminar participants come from various domains of business, are usually from the industrial or service sectors and are often managers and their assistants – a colourful assortment of people, really, not only from Audi but also from a broad spectrum of the free market economy.
Sometimes I use the SAGA cards as well as the OH cards, especially when the topic is leadership: these images with their figures of highly symbolic characters facilitate a ready comprehension of particular group mechanisms having to do with leadership.
Ralf Linde ~ Trainer for the AUDI Academy
Ingolstadt, Germany
Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, by Waltraud Kirschke.
