English conference on “Motivation vs Personality” towards ISTP Engineers

On feb27th evening, I had the opportunity to perform an english conference towards 150 ISTP (Institut Supérieur des Techniques de la Performance) Saint Etienne engineers students from “Génie industriel” section.

Subject was related to “Motivation and Personality“. Everyone of this audience has and will have to face with reaching high level standards on teamwork efficiency, as people or project managers.

My processus is to propose an alternative approach to the usual team roles definition : first get some understanding on team members personality (i.e personal development) and then assign roles by motivation rather than by expertise only. I use my favorite personality model , ComColors , that I enjoy much as playful, positive and efficient. Some short teamup exercises were performed at the beginning, enabling participants to understand more about themselves and get feedback from their neighbours.

Outcomes have exceeded my best expectations, assessing  :

  1. the enthousiastic return from the audience at the end of the conference, showing their interest to such soft skills despite attending such event in a relative low energy for most of them due  to a full day of training courses (tired, hungry,…)
  2. the very positive feedback from ISTP training management

This kind of large audience exercice is quite new for me, specifically as not in my native language. However, I like such personal challenges and I’m pleased to share and get future managers concerned about those issues.

Sharing positive and “easy to implement” tips helps everyone’s from the audience to become more aligned with one’s values, as concerned and motivated as we can at work, both combining personal and team objectives.

As a conclusion, in my trainer and facilitator role,  I will use the 2 teamworking acronyms : WIIIFM & WIIIFT (What Is In It For Me/What is in it for team) .  They are in my views 2 key and basics ingredients of the recipe to teamwork efficiently in the long run for agile organizations.

I’m eager to perform again such event towards ISTP Nuclear section engineers within few weeks !

Richard, Feb28th 2018