I am just finishing a two week Senior Executive Institute at the University of Virginia. The experience has been great! The food has been outstanding and the learning experience better than the food.
The primary goal of the course has been to teach leaders of local government how to lead their organizations to a new high performance level. To learn this, we had several grueling days of classroom work and small group exercises to show how creating a high performance team can be done. My group has shown this in incredible ways.
Our first challenge was in a fun environment – bowling. Our challenge was to say only positive and encouraging statements and to increase the performance of the team from game one to game two. My incredible team had the top men's score, the top women's score, the greatest improvement from game one to game two and the third best women's score. I was the champion of the 9 pin game. I got more 9 pin frames than the rest of the team but no one was counting that. I did get one strike to contribute to the improving scores!
While the games had their place, the real learning came in working with the small group. Our group included three city managers, one librarian, a Public Information Officer, a Public Works Director and the Executive Director of a Recreation District. Each contributed to my experience and to the total learning experience.
We had our challenges getting together initially but are not just seven individuals but one fully functioning group. The experience puts the reality of our organizations at home and how they perform in a new light. What you expect of our organization has a number of variables. There is a performance level—what we get done and the experience you have when we perform it. This causes us to look at what we are doing and then ask is this the right what? (I think you need to say the last sentence out loud to get the right meaning. Emphasize the last underlined what.) If what we are doing is not the expectation of the community then we are not performing at the level that makes for a satisfied constituency.
This is just a small example of our week.
