PRESIDENTIAL VISION
Vision for Thessaloniki 2019 - 40th National Selection Conference of EYP Greece This document describes the way I lead teams and includes some elements that I would like to experiment with in Thessaloniki. It has three sections: about me, vision for working experience – team leaders, vision for chairs team. Before anything else, I would like to stress that open and honest communication is the core of my vision, therefore all points are up to discussion. I also love efficient communication, so I tried to make this as short and readable as possible.
If you are skimming this, you may just read the words in bold.
About me I’m a chill person that you will never see stressed at the session; I am also very organised, flexible and ready to experiment. I believe that the true ability of a team leader is seen when they have to deal with unforeseen circumstances – and in sessions there are often chances of proving that.
Vision for working experience – team leaders:
Good communication between team leaders
Happiness and well-being of team leaders will result in our teams’ happiness and well-being. I believe that this all revolves around communication. A fundamental part of this is transparency. I will share with you the motherboard that I use for sessions, where you will find literally everything that you may want to know about my team. To give you an idea, here is what I used in Odense: http://bit.ly/MB_Odense
Mutual understanding of objectives
This starts from before the session, when team leaders should have a Skype and share their expectations with each other, potentially starting some inter-team cooperation. At the session, I believe that it is important to have an activity to visually show when teams are most stressed/relaxed and to understand what the objectives of each team are: this is up for further discussion. I also believe that team leaders must strive to ensure that every team can achieve their objectives, and not just their own.
Vision for the chairs’ team: My aim is to create a relaxed and productive working experience. It is difficult to achieve a balance between the two, and I will explain how I aim to do that. R – Relaxed; P - Productive
1. Empowerment and support [R+P] Empowerment means that chairs will take care of some tasks of the board (e.g. delivering some trainings at the sessions’ training) and VPs will support in some tasks generally only done by the president (e.g. selection panel of chairs). It is fundamental to stress on both elements, because you often see empowerment without support, which cannot be successful because without feedback one cannot grow. In fact, I use feedback as a tool to improve any kind of performance and not just the ‘successful’ ones, since I believe that everyone can learn and improve.
2. VPs as co-presidents [P] This is one of the core elements of my vision and it means that the 3 VPs will be on the same level as myself and I would consider them as my peers, including them in all decisions whenever possible. I would see myself as a representative of the board, meaning that during leadership meetings or interteam Skype meetings, I would first collect their opinions before talking with you. How can we achieve this?
Separate selection of vice-presidents (selected first) and chairs (selected after the VPs). Including the vice-presidents in the selection of chairs. Floating board.
3. Efficient and effective pre-session preparation [R + P] Forget never-ending purposeless Skypecalls: I value your time as much as I value mine and I have taken part in numerous unnecessary Skypecalls in my EYP experience, so trust me when I say that I will make sure to avoid those. Moreover, the time before the session will be dedicated to planning, while the session is the time to execute. For that, the idea is to use the time we have beforehand to also maximise the time we have at the session: for instance, this means that the basic modules will be covered in an online pre-session training (what is teambuilding; what is committee work). That should save time at the session and we could have more in-depth and interactive modules there.
4. Feedback culture (before, during, after the session) [P] Feedback will also be one of the pillars of the experience and it will be offered before the session (to all applicants – including the successful ones), at the session (on the performance) and after the session (on the performance again, through evaluations and feedback).