teamfocus6-blog

[teamfocus6-blog]

Milestones of our Premium programme

We are happy to announce that our final product is ready! 

It has been a wonderful journey. Six girls from different countries with different backgrounds met for the very first time at Buitenplaats Vaeshartelt- on the edge of Maastricht. Our client Team-Focus helped us get to know each other through experiential learning. After that, we were full of motivation to work together as a team and started developing a tool for ownership. We held many meetings, had countless brainstorm sessions, lots of reading, few dinners, lots of snacks, hours of searching and texting. Our Teamwork was great, but as you can see on the chart, we had our ups and downs with the progress of our product. At the end of April, we felt like we hadn't gotten very far compared to the ideas of other groups at the midterm presentations. But then, teamwork made the dream work, and great ideas started to come together. Meetings with our mentor supported us and enabled us to reach higher and higher. And now... the product is ready and we are looking forward to showing it to our client next week. 

See you tomorrow, Premium team and students! ;) 

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Running out of time

Time flies when you are having FUN!

Only T-8 days until Premium is coming to an end. 

We are really happy to be nominated for our creative Tumblr skills. Working on this Tumblr page has been a lot of fun for us and will be a nice memory to look back on in 10 years. 

We can't wait to reveal our final product on this page after presenting it to our client!

Tumblr, don't worry, there are still some posts to come before we finish this project for good. So stay tuned! 

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Gaia ZOO

Last Wednesday Daniella and Kertu had a chance to take part of the workshop “Beyond monkey business” at the Gaia Zoo. 

After a quick introduction we were told to observe different groups of animals as real biologist do, free of interpretation. We looked at wild dogs, gorillas & mangabeys, parrots- and had to describe their characteristics, behavior, environment and think about their hierarchy in the group. 

Later on, we discussed our observations as a group and realized that humans have a lot in common with animals --more than what we like to admit! As humans, we tend to think that we are the superior species and differentiate ourselves from others. However, when we discussed the hierarchies in the [animals] we saw a comparable pattern to the leadership styles we see in our everyday lives. It taught us how to observe teams and group functioning in an unbiased way. 

Thank you Premium team for an inspirational day!

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After countless brainstorms we are finally heading towards a clear goal that we are looking to reach before this month’s deadline of course. Our mission: we want people to OWN UP to their contributions and decisions in team contexts and show more responsibility of their own actions. We already came up with a framework on how we want to achieve that, so what we need to do now, is visualize it in a clear way that makes it fun and appealing to our client! During our last session we had a pretty great breakthrough as to how to go about this. Our idea sure did light up our faces (as you can see in the video above) - let’s hope it does the same for our client! 🏁🏃🏽‍♀️💚

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Creating challenges

This is how our meetings look like- lot of discussions, brainstorming, writing, drawing and eating. Sometimes you can also see us talking with the computer, because as we wrote in our last post, one of our team member Loubelle is with us through Skype. Greetings to Hong Kong!

Currently, we are in a process of creating an implicit challenge for the companies. It is definitely not an easy task to do, but during brainstorming, we came up with many creative options, what we now have to develop further and make them more specific for the end product. 

We created a framework which includes the timeline showing when the exact step is taking place ( during the training or at the workplace) and then divided challenges depending on the main problem area of the company. Workplace nudging is also included within the challenges.

At the end of the meeting, we divided the challenges and everybody got the homework to explain the activities and write down the instructions for the specific challenge.

Although we don’t have a product yet and there is not so much time left as the end of the Premium is coming closer, we are still confident that we can deliver a great product in the end.

Teamwork makes the dream work!

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Greetings from Asia!

One of our team members, Loubelle Butalid, has recently moved to Hong Kong for her Thesis Project! This past weekend, she flew to Manila to visit family and while she was there, she had the opportunity to attend an entrepreneurial workshop entitled “IGNITE XCHANGE”, where she may have gained some inspiration for our project! Be on the lookout for some potential innovative and creative ideas! :) 

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Friday morning with the client

Showing the results of our brainstorming session to the client went to a really in-depth discussion.

“Where to put ownership in this model?” was a question we were looking an answer for.

Our client was really happy with our ideas but still challenges us to think more creatively about the end product.

We have chosen the direction and now it is time to make a crazy and effective tool for the companies to increase ownership. 

Have a great sunny weekend :) 

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Hey guys, we’re BACK!!! We survived the exam period and celebrated with a great and super effective brainstorm session. Looks kinda messy don’t you think? But we managed to narrow it down to 3 concrete ideas! Tomorrow we will meet our client and see what he thinks :)

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Wasn’t the mid-term presentation a FANTASTIC experience? We certainly think so! Here’s a short recap from our presentation..enjoy :) 

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Happy monday everyone!

Just before the weekend, 2 of our members, Kertu and Luisa went to meet with our client Jean Paul to update him on our progress. It was great to hear Jean Paul’s opinion and his input was a huge boost. We can’t wait to get back to work after our Midterm Presentation tomorrow!

Check out the VLOG above to get an impression of Team Focus’ beautiful work environment and see how much fun Kertu and Luisa had being back at Vaeshartelt where we had our first team meeting.

Enjoy the rest of your day and stay tuned for an update on our presentation tomorrow!

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Experiential learning

Our client TeamFocus is offering experiential learning courses for companies to provide an opportunity for continuous learning and improvement of their employees. But what is it exactly?

Experiential learning is the process of learning through experience and is more specifically defined as learning through reflection on doing. It is designed to help each person gain insight in their own way through introspection and self-directed activities. Based on Kolb’s experiential learning style theory, there are four stages in the learning process:

1.     Concrete experience

2.     Reflective observation of the new experience

3.     Abstract conceptualization

4.     Active experimentation 

A good experiential training session with a group creates a shared experience for everyone to play and learn in a safe space!

Check out the video for great examples and have a nice weekend!

Ref: Sims, Ronald R (1983). "Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory: A Framework for Assessing Person-Job Interaction". Academy of Management Review. 8: 501–508

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VLOG from our fun session this afternoon!

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Brainstorm Session

Last week, we brainstormed and put all the information we gathered from the different literature based on various themes: ownership, leadership, teamwork/team building, transferability, behaviour change, motivation and rituals.

If you have a look at the mind map we created, we have divided the factors into three different levels: individual, team, and organization. You can see that most of the factors are linked to leadership, so that is why we are turning our attention to it in the upcoming weeks.

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We could not agree more on what Mattie Stepanek has to say :)

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The new week has started and during the weekend we found lots of new information for the project. But before revealing our awesome new ideas lets introduce us. Check out the video! ;) 

Have a successful week! 

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Three weeks ago, Maastricht celebrated CARNAVAL 2018 and it was so much fun! Two of our team members, Daniella & Loubelle, even made into the local LIMBURG NEWSPAPER with their selfie pictures! SO GREAT! #CARNAVAL2018 #Maastricht 

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Sneak peak of yet another successful brainstorm session...