March 24 - Team Blast to Test Rider Students’ Leadership Skills
LAWRENCEVILLE, NJ – “Competitive collaboration” will be the name of the game for up to 150 students, faculty and staff who will participate in Team Blast activities the Center for the Development of Leadership Skills (CDLS) will sponsor on Sunday, April 3.
CDLS students, student government leaders, residence hall advisors, and Omicron Delta Kappa members, as well as interested faculty and staff members, will test their teamwork abilities in simultaneous activities scheduled from noon to 5 p.m. throughout the Bart Luedeke Center.
“The Team Blast team-building event is an exploration of student-faculty-staff teamwork in action,” said Dr. Carol Watson, CDLS director. “It can best be described as a 10-ring circus, a rock concert and team-building program all wrapped up into one event.”
Team Blast is specifically designed for team building with larger groups, which maximizes opportunities for networking and relationship building while underscoring the importance of collaboration between teams to achieve organizational success.
Executive Edge, Inc., a firm that provides creative, fun and effective team building and leadership developing programs, will run the event. Since 1989, it has worked with numerous companies such as Ernst & Young LLP, KeyBank, Foot Locker, TravelCenters of America, Pfizer, Applebee’s Restaurants, KPMG and Avery Dennison. Now the company will tailor its event specifically to meet Rider’s needs.
“We want to have a fun, interactive program that is customized to achieve Rider’s learning objectives,” Dr. Watson said.
Those objectives are: appreciation of each person’s talents/skills, involvement of each person in the group/community, support for taking risks and trying new things, challenge to do personal best, open and honest communication, practicing collaboration, personal and team empowerment, and just having fun.
“Most of all, we want students to observe and practice leadership skills in a highly interactive and structured program,” said Dr. Watson. “This is a way to explore leadership and challenge students.”
Dr. Watson said there will be five different teams with 10 teams of up to 15 people per team. They will begin as loosely knit groups, but work to establish their goals and self-organization to create solutions to support team success. Teams will rotate through five activities and track their points on a student success scorecard.
As the event progresses, teams begin to understand the need for cross-team collaboration and sharing best practices. Teams are rewarded for successfully completing activities, sharing best practices and collaborating.
