Running a project team

25’ duration: (Trainer) - (support: slides & video & web)

→ Running a project team “The open leadership approach”

Open leadership is a set of practices and skills people can use to mobilize their communities to solve shared problems and achieve shared goals. To put it another way, open leaders design and build projects that empower people to collaborate within inclusive communities. Open leaders are guided by open principles. They strive for:

• Understanding: They make the work accessible and clear.

• Sharing: They make the work easy to adapt, reproduce and spread.

• Participation & inclusion: They make the work inviting, relevant and safe for all.

To apply these principles, open leaders take these practices. They:

• Design: They make contextual, deliberate decisions about how and when to be open

• Build: They create structures and systems that ensure clarity and process-based management.

• Empower: They model personal leadership skills that sustain them and their contributors.

As a result, open leaders and their communities, organizations and projects work towards these objectives. They help their communities, organizations and projects:

• Improve the efficiency, quality and relevance of their work.

• Discover new, innovative solutions that make sense to them.

• Increase the discoverability, reach, lifespan and usefulness of their work.

Not every community, organization or project works towards all of those objectives, principles or actions at once. Instead, open leaders work with their contributors - the people who give their time, talent and expertise to a project - to focus on the elements that will help them achieve shared goals. For example, a local project might first work to improve efficiency, quality and relevance. Later, it might share more to increase the discoverability, reach, lifespan and usefulness of its work. Then another community could discover new, innovative solutions localized for them.

After having introduced the concept of open leadership, the trainer asks the teams to start brainstorming about the challenges the open leadership approach could bring to a project. Would the decision making-process be easier?

25’ duration: (Trainer) - (support: slides & video & web)

→ Team building for sustainability

Team building is a collective term for various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within teams, often involving collaborative tasks. Team building is one of the foundations of organizational development that can be applied to groups such as sports teams, school classes, projects teams. Team building includes:

• aligning around goals

• building effective working relationships

• reducing team members' role ambiguity

• finding solutions to team problems

There are many environmentally friendly team building activities that can be organized and that can inspire the work of the team. Here you can find some ideas!

What kind of activities could your students organize to improve their team building?