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October 03, 2005
Personal development - a workshop with Dato' Lawrence
I am now busily engaged in my new company and what they try to achieve is change in the company's setting and doing. Basically, the company is already pretty large, split into various departments and spread across different floors. The HR department has great plans in getting the different departments in the section I am working in, together and therefore planned a teambuilding workshop over a weekend. This is a great initiative and apparently, the first time this has been initiated.
For this purposes, they hired "Personal Development Leadership Management Corporation" or PDL-MC, run by Dato' Lawrence. For me, this was a first with him, and well, I was in for some surprise.
The workshop started off with singing. The National Anthem, and some songs that were suppose to bring us together, set us up for a great mood and spirit. It might be okay, if you would have known what came up to you in the beginning. Can this be seen as change? It is change, because it throws you in a situation that one is normally not really used to.
We did work over the two days - did some exercise on thinking skills, and had to read together statements from the board. It is okay, I understand the procedures. Reading those statements pushes the message harder into the brain, into the subconscious mind. It is good to have something on thinking skills.
What I didn't like was the emptiness of the conclusions. When it was said that one need to have "innovative thinking", "needs to be motivated", "think differently or creatively". Those are empty words, because they don't help. Everybody has an own inner picture of what this means - but it doesn't tell anyone, how to think creatively, how to be motivated. What do you do to think innovatively, how to initiate the process.
Additionally, Dato' Lawrence's jokes were a bit at the bad side. At least that was what some of the women in the course mentioned. He also had an ongoing sales push in his sessions. Showing pictures of CEOs here and another one there. Nothing against this, and for him, this was to establish credentials. But it was a bit too much. In addition, there were plenty of newspaper articles hanging at the wall and letters from clients that praised him. Sure, he can be proud of it, and I am happy for him. Again, Dato' Lawarence wanted to show the credentials, but then, this is training and not a sales session.
The best part of the whole weekend were the games that we played to build the team. Those were entertaining and challenging. It was good that PDL build in team reviews. We needed to check, what we did well, what went wrong, and how we can strategise the next time around. Fine by me.
There was more to it and well, I appreciated the time that it allowed me to meet those colleagues that I didn't know before. The exercises were great for those who did something like this for the first time, and there were plenty.
For me, well, brain development, change management, motivation and neuroscience is nothing really new. This is my hobby, and with all my earlier and ongoing training in these areas, this training by PDL-MC was, well, not worth the money spent.
Posted by Andreas at October 3, 2005 12:10 PM