On 17 July 2019 the branch hosted David Ramsey who shared some his insights related to experiential leadership and management. As a qualified coach, David has been presenting courses on experiential leadership to SAICE, SAIMechE and SAIEE for the past 8 years and has excellent insights into the skills that engineering leaders and managers must develop in order to move from being technically competent to being great people managers who can inspire others.

The talk was run as an interactive workshop, touching on some of the topics that he would typically cover in the seminars and courses that he presents for engineers. He started by asking participants to introduce themselves and share stories about times in which they felt most proud as leaders. He then ran through some basic theory around leadership versus management, the lifecycle of change, how to motivate people, the roles of a manager and different learning styles.

The talk ended off with a fun team-building exercise known as the marshmallow challenge (https://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower?language=en) in which teams are given spaghetti, string and tape and the task of building the tallest possible tower to support a marshmallow in 10 minutes. It might sound easy, but it turned out to be a really humbling task for all the engineers in the room, with very few of the teams succeeding in producing a tower which even stood at all! The biggest mistake made? Spending way too much time talking and planning instead of trying and testing things to see what worked!

You can find out more about David Ramsey and the work he is doing on his website or LinkedIn.

David Q Ramsay