leaders
YGL Blog 2019
17 July 2019
Monday 15th July
The L&E Young Global Leaders programme is a very unique opportunity for young people from around the world to come together to learn and understand what makes good young leaders. In our small team we have participants from Hong Kong, Spain, Russia, Italy, Sweden, Germany, France and UK. Now if that isn’t what Young Global Leaders should be all about then I don’t what is!!?
We started on Monday morning with a brief questionnaire about our expectations and what we felt our strengths and weaknesses were. We then spent quite a bit of time introducing each other and getting to know one another. My gosh…these young leaders are so incredibly interesting. Their dreams and ambitions are astounding but with a firm belief and commitment to achieve them.
We then looked at some well known leaders and discussed their attributes…Trump, Merkel, Messi, Sir Alex Ferguson, Mandela and Greta Thunberg.
It was certainly an interesting discussion as you can imagine!
The afternoon session included some camp fire cooking skills that will hopefully come in useful for the Wilderness trip later on in the week…
Tuesday, 16th July
Tuesday brought some problem solving to the table. It was a team effort but there were certainly some characters that came to the fore with some astute leadership skills…all with different styles mind you.
You may have heard of Edward de Bono!? A Maltese modern day psychologist who came up with an interesting theory about different ways of thinking within a team.
When making a collective decision it’s always good to have members of the team who behave and look at things differently. It’s called The 6 Thinking Hats.
Six distinct directions are identified and assigned a color. The six directions are:
- Managing Blue – what is the subject? what are we thinking about? what is the goal? Can look at the big picture.
- Information White – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
- Emotions Red – intuitive or instinctive gut reactions or statements of emotional feeling (but not any justification).
- Discernment Black – logic applied to identifying reasons to be cautious and conservative. Practical, realistic.
- Optimistic response Yellow – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony. Sees the brighter, sunny side of situations.
- Creativity Green – statements of provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes. Thinks creatively, outside the box.
This was an incredibly rewarding session where the team were given the task of planning a birthday party and designing the Best Summer Camp (pretty tough competition out there I’ve heard!!??)
They were given different “hats” to see if they were able to think differently and also were able to choose the “hat” that they were most comfortable with.
We hope that the skills learnt will be beneficial to them for the rest of their lives.
Wednesday brings a very exciting proposition…The Wilderness Experience. Plans have been made and now just the expedition itself is there to complete. We look forward to telling you all about it tomorrow. Till then….
