IGE 2014 Anwesha's Diary - Part 1

Who is a leader? What qualities do we seek in a leader? The International Gold Event (IGE) 2014 tried to address these two primary questions. Though the questions seem simple enough and anyone can give very insightful answers to these questions, we, the delegates of IGE 2014 wanted to understand the intricate details of leadership.

IGE Seoul saw participation of seventy-five very enthusiastic emerging leaders from thirty four

countries. We all came together to understand the concepts of leadership, get a stronger hold of the “global’’ nature of the Award and to build ‘high-performing teams.’

The event started off with team forming- delegates from different countries were grouped together and each group was assigned a facilitator. At this point, probably it will be helpful if I mention that to understand the diversity among the representatives we were randomly put in a group and were expected to work together. It did not matter what kind of activities we did because at the end of the day what we had to achieve was to become an effective team.

So what is your definition of an effective team? What I had in my team was a bunch of very capable people each with their strengths and weaknesses. Rob Oliphant, Tim Smith and John May had planned out numerous activities for us. These ranged from a variety of ball games, skipping and other innovative games. This is when our creativity and team-spirit was put to test. All the tasks set were team games. They were simple enough- no big deal jumping over a skipping rope right? Wrong. In a team of eight, two were to stand on the edges holding and spinning the rope while the rest of us had to jump over it with each loop. This was probably the toughest things that we had done in a long time. Soon enough we realized that we had to delegate the taller ones to spin the rope. At the end were not only expected to display team work, but also learn about efficient utilization of individual talents. 

Over three days and through many exciting activities, we were made to practice what ‘high-performing teams’ are. We started recognizing each other’s talents as we began trusting one another with responsibilities.