A635.6.3.RB – EcoSeagate

What defines success or failure of today’s organization is the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall behavior of an organization.  To be globally positioned in a competitive edge, it is imperative that organizations embrace change to meet the needs of their customers and stakeholders and retain highly skilled employees.  The organization’s leadership has an empirical need to identify a new set of desired behaviors and develop a strategic plan that collectively leads to its organizational behavior that is effective and efficient to achieve its stated goals and improved organizational performance. 

Whatever the new final set of desired behaviors are, top management has to decide to proceed implementation of the identified need set of behaviors, develops the plan on how it has to be achieved and provides resources for the change initiative.  Supervisors lead and facilitate the employees to perform desired behaviors that will result in improved effectiveness and efficiency in overall organizational behavior.  It is critical that management seeks feedback from their employees about the plan to assess if the scheme needs modification to improve the organization’s ability to behave in the new set of desired behaviors.

According to Brown (2011), outdoor experiential laboratory training is becoming to be the most standard methodology for leadership training and teamwork building.  It involves extreme activities that require moderate physical exertion with almost an absence of danger.  The goal of the outdoor lab process is not taking the physical risk, but the physical risk exercises are supposed to challenge every participant to be at their best.  Brown (2011) also cautioned us that the OD practitioner should find balance within the activities and opportunities for team development.  Participants should enjoy the exercises and should not metamorphosize of becoming too dangerous. 

In a sense, I can find value in the EcoSeagate team development process to viewers like me, but I am not absolute if the team players feel the same during and after the severe and hazardous activities.  Two scenes made an impact to me when watching the Eco-Challenge: New Zealand and Africa.  First was when one of the participants of Borneo team indicated that it is of importance to know your strengths, but it is also of importance to know your own limitations.  Self-awareness is of importance to once personal growth.  The very first step of development is recognizing our limits and be willing to unlearn the things that we need to unlearn and start fresh to learning new things.  There will be human barriers or issues that we have to face, but if we persevere to learning and developing our own deficiencies, it will only result in success.  Fluency in accomplishing a task is an obvious route, but leadership mastery is a lifetime goal.

The second scene was the scene from team Lupus of Eco-Challenge Africa, where Robyn, one of the team member commented that members of the team should work together, be supportive of one another and not break each other down.  She added that the decision-making should be made by the team and not by one member of the team.  On the other hand, Scott, who seemed to have served in the military, claimed that Robyn needs to learn to approach the competition like the military way where one person gives the order and the followers need to follow the leader’s order no matter what without questioning.  In my world, that type of thinking will no be very instrumental. 

The different activities that involved physical risks or endangerment developed by EcoSeagate for their team development or team building will not be beneficial or befit for my current organization.  Although team building activities offsite that involved critical and innovative thinking of a composition of team building activities will certainly be beneficial to my organization.  At Adventist Health System, all staff and leadership are encouraged and empowered to adopt a behavior of producing or involvement giving them stakes in the decision-making or leading initiative that has a direct effect on their jobs or positions in the organization.  The culture of building, co-ownership, empowerment, and involvement has translated to increased productivity in our organization.  Employees who feel vested in our organization cultivate the strong work ethics within their peers, they have become more self-sufficient, and are getting confidence in navigating their responsibilities, with minimal interference and depending lesser from their supervisors for direction in accomplishing tasks.  The culture of producing and empowerment also fosters team cohesion within our organization without participating in activities that may or may not affect their physical and emotional exhaustion.

Building and developing more cohesive teams or high-performing teams, outdoor experiential laboratory training is necessary but one way or another, there has to be some other way than risking the lives of your employees.  Incentivising employees for their creative work or taste for participating in high physical or emotional risk is not enough to boost advancement in technology and employee morale, retention, and development.  Open communication that is built on trust and acknowledging the employee’s creativity and contribution is of utmost importance to continually promote and encourage innovative and creative thinking within the organization. 

A majority of organizations of today’s business environment has embraced the fact that successful innovation is essential to be competitive in the marketplace.  It is also of necessity for company’s promoting a culture of innovation to develop a process or methodology in sustaining and supporting an innovative workplace culture.  Another requisite in formulating and maintaining a culture of innovation is developing a workforce that is innovative where creativity and critical thinking are part of the artistic training where employees understand the process of evaluating their assumptions as well as others and analyzing information or data to arrive at quality judgment and determination.  Once the employees’ creativity and critical thinking skills are enhanced, generating adaptive ideas and teamwork will be spontaneous.

References:

Brown, D.R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8^th ed.). Upper

Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

FunkyPotato (2013). Eco-Challenge: New Zealand 6of6 [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7CV6-o9BBs

KoiNadi (2012). Eco-Challenge Fiji – Full Episode – [01 fo 05] [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tB8REpwty_M