Quiet recently,
I attended a 5 day TCI workshop. TCI is a unique concept developed by a German
Psychologist, Ms.Ruth Cohn. TCI stands
for Theme Centred Interaction, which means a group of peopleinteract with each
other on a particular theme. This interaction helps the participant to gain
more insight and a better understanding of some real life situations and
challenges, from different perspectives. Every TCI Workshop has a theme. The
workshop I attended was on the theme, “Do men and women lead differently? We
had two international facilitators, Mr.Konrad from Germany and Mrs.Annelis from
Switzerland to handle this workshop, which made it more interesting.
The TCI session
titles are different and interesting. One of the sessionsof this workshop was,
“Drawing together with you and you…. finding my own space”. In this session, our facilitator formed 3
groups of 6 people each. We were given
chart board with a box of crayons. The instruction given to us was, each group
should do a drawing in the chart provided, but the rule is that the members
within the group should not discuss or talk within the group. The time given
was 15 minutes. This was a nice challenge, because there was no scope for
planning what we are going to draw. So, our group sat on the floor together
with the chart board in the centre. I took a yellow crayon and started drawing
a sun, on the top of the chart. My team members seemed to get a clue, that we
could draw scenery together and one of them started to draw a flock of birds
with a black crayon and another person drew the clouds with a blue crayon. I
soon followed it up, by drawing a mountain range across the chart with a brown
crayon. In no time the chart paper became a beautiful scenery with a flowing
river, tall trees, blooming flowers, a house, people, cattle and other things.
When the time
was over, we were pleasantly surprised to see, that our drawing has come out
nicely, inspite of we not speaking a single word with each other.
Now it was time
for the facilitators to give their observation of each team. The facilitator,
when giving his observations about our team, captured the essence of how we
worked as a team. He pointed out that, it was me, who initiated the drawing,
which he mentioned as a positive leadership trait. He said a leader is one who initiates.
These words made me feel good about myself. He then said something that was like
an invisible hammer striking hard on my head.He said, that I did not just stop
with initiating the drawing, I went on to use large amount of the space in the chart
paper to draw the mountain range. By doing so, I have been insensitive to the
space requirements of my team members.
In the large chart paper, everyone should find space for their
expression, but by occupying a large extent of space in the chart board, I have
curtailed the expression of the other members of the team.
I realised that
very moment, what he said was right. It was an eye opener to me.I was astounded
to find that our subconscious mind gets manifested by our behaviour, exposing
our true inner nature, even without having to say a single word. I felt bad
about myself, but did not miss to take the learning of the day. I learnt that I need to give others their
needed space, so as to help them find expression of their true potential. I
have been unconscious of my own mistake.When he spotted this out, I realised
that I have aninner tendency to do more than what is expected of me. This doing
more than what is expected, is not a good trait, when it comes to working as a
team. As a team, every team member should feel a spirit of contribution to a
project accomplished. By doing all the things, that others could do, we are in
fact robbing from them, the joy of teamwork. In team work it is never ‘my
work’, but it is ‘our work’.
Most of us commit
this mistake unconsciously, at work place, social organisations or even family.
We tend to dominate the show. We want to see the end result to be exactly the way;
we mentally imagined it to be. But in a collaborative world, this sort of
thought infringement would leave a negative mark of not being a good team
player.r.A creative collaboration of ideas canin fact give a unique outcome,
which an individual mind can never conceive.So, next time, when you are working
on a team project, ask yourself, “Am I givingothers the needed space, to
express themselves?”.
Happy Reading,
D.Senthil Kannan
Article dated March
2012
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