Lenovo’s leadership team came together in New Orleans, Louisiana to share a team building experience. The Creating a Team Culture Workshop was a great experience of sharing, skill building and attitude improvement. These talented people came from the US and China to participate in this fun and activity-driven experience that had people sharing, laughing and learning more about each other and practicing practical leadership skills. As often is the case, the quality of the people enhanced the quality of the event. Also, the cross cultural dimension added fun and insight into the event which was a solid learning experience.

The smaller group added to the intimacy and made the meeting more informal and made it easy to emphasize the material on leading effective meetings. Often times meeting are schedule because that’s what we do- we have meetings. These meeting often lack clarity or meaning, but are largely seen as too much time with too little results. Even if there is a definite design or purpose for the meetings too often they just become information sharing and too many topics are covered to be effective; or so much extraneous material is introduced that nothing really get accomplished that makes difference.

Each meeting needs to have a definite purpose, a definite statement as to the reason for the meeting and a specific goal or agenda to accomplish. The leader must be willing and able to keep to the task and judiciously wade through the tangents that come up without losing the focus of the desired outcome. Often problem solving meetings fail to put into place a solution that has accountability built in. The meeting needs to address possible causes of the problem as well as possible solutions so that the problem can be well defined and understood from a causality perspective. Be careful not to place blame, but rather consider the contributing factors. To come up with solutions without considering possible contributing problems is to overlook a major part of the problem solving meeting. Lenovo did a great job in defining the problem, considering possible causes and solutions, and then solved a real problem that each member of this team was facing.

Thanks to Lenovo for a great experience with great people. The Leaders Institute looks forward to a great relationship and more opportunties to work in Creating a Team Culture.

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