Personal Effectiveness/Effective Leadership Workshop

A two day workshop on "Personal Effectiveness" and "Effective Leadership" was recently held in Gopalpur-on-Sea. The workshop focused on personal effectiveness leading to effective leadership through self-awareness. The Jungian theory of personality types was extensively discussed and used for mapping and self-assessment.  The wind, surf and sea provided an extremely relaxing atmosphere for the team members and facilitated self-introspection and deep diving within. A quick interaction with selected team members showed that the workshop was extremely helpful, timely and more such workshops are needed in future. A detailed feedback form will be administered to all the participants and based on their feedback the next workshop, will be planned. I do sincerely hope that the team members will consciously try to implement the learning's at least in a piece meal manner to start with - because by bringing about small changes, one can ultimately bring about the overall change that one wishes to see in oneself.

Core Group Meeting - Bangalore

A sub-group of the core group met recently in Bangalore last month. The meeting was chaired by the Director DE. A number of areas and issues were discussed. The most interesting discussion focused on the o3 project - fully funded by the US Govt and currently being implemented in selected schools of India and Pakistan. The project basically focuses on understanding each others culture with an exchange visit, built in. The most interesting part of the presentation by Roopak, my colleague, who heads this project, was on the methodology to be followed in going about the collaborative projects basically using the Internet and allied technologies. Apart from this the meeting basically focused on quantified targets and process level checks at all levels. Going ahead a detail school visit plan / template, will be worked out for the coordinators across all the states to arrest leakages at the school level, which is the result of a lack of proper planning, non-availability of a contingency plan and absence of crisis management skills as far as the coordinators are concerned.