I’m looking at running a night doing some team building and leadership exercises, trying to get the cadets working together and channel their inner leadership. Has anyone done anything similar and if so what have you found that works well?
Something we did which worked well on several counts was a squadron clean up.
The NCOs were told what was required and they took an area assembled a group of cadets each and a couple of hours later clean hut and surrounds.
They turned up in something that they could get dirty in, we made sure they had enough bits and provided some eats. But being cadets that means more bits than the average adult requires
It beat the atypical ‘leadership/teambuilding’ exercise and the cadets saw the results (we could see the result) at the end of the night and from the sounds in the hut they seemed to enjoy it more than messing around with rope and planks etc.
It’s something we’ll be doing again.
Sounds like a good idea, thanks Teflon. It may tie in nicely with our AFI too!
I did a clean up in a similar way to this not that long ago as a way of building teamwork, providing an opportunity for leadership to Cpls, Supervision and decision making for SNCOs, and giving an instilling a sense of how the CoC should work… and let me chill out in the office for a couple of hours without having 20 cadets queueing up to see me about 50 different things.
I briefed the FS on which team should be allocated each area, we had the satellite work teams led by a Cpl, a Sgt and FS generally overseeing (one upstairs, one downstairs), and a Cpl taking the role of “Quartermaster”. The idea was that he was in charge of all equipment - need a black bag? See the QM, need the hoover? see the QM and if its available, he’ll give it to you, if not, he’ll put you next on the list. Why have you got the mop when you haven’t had the broom yet? Give it back to the QM. QM doesn’t have what you need? He has to find it.
Only the QM or the SNCOs could come see me. If one of the SNCOs came to me wanting equipment, I referred them to the QM (as that is how the CoC was set up in this scenario - he was the authority on that over and above… even SNCOs need to learn a little humility occasionally and understand that it’s not always rank that trumps).
It worked really well, had the desired effects, and everyone actually enjoyed it, too.