‘LEARNING MANAGEMENT LESSONS THROUGH OUTDOOR ADVENTURE PROGRAM.’ How good would that be! That’s what I, along with my class mates went for Outward-bound Management Learning and Organizational Development Services through IILM, Gurgaon. They have quite innovative programs, skilled faculty, robust infrastructure and facilities to help students learn fast.

The methodology they use, which we as a team could gather, consists of the following:

• Transition from campus to corporate

• Building teams faster and better

• Developing highly effective leaders

• Reducing process inefficiencies

• Inspiring participants to achieve the seemingly impossible

We were made to learn a lot of management lessons like Team-Work, Leadership etc through the various Games they had in their program. The best part of training was that it was entirely practical, which actually attracts students more to learn. After all, “Experience is The Best Teacher!”

The most important thing that I got to learn from these games was know-how of working in a team. The 1st and foremost important thing is to be an active listener. The next most important skill is interaction. We should be open to discuss the strategies and able to persuade other team members. I learnt that we should have equal respect for all our team members. There should always be an equal participation of all the members of a team. Last, but not the least, there should be unity and trust within the group members. We had a competitor team, whose members were not cooperating with each other since the beginning of the program. Ultimately, they lost many levels of the game.

Above all this that we learnt, we need to have a person who has great ideas, and could assemble a team to bring that concept to life. We need someone called Leader.

Each person in every other game got a chance to be the leader of the respective game. I personally learnt that a leader should be honest in all manners. A good leader ‘walks the talk’ and in doing so, earns the right to have responsibility of others. A leader needs to be confident enough of what the strategies of the team are, with a positive attitude. He/She needs to be a person who can instruct others to work, alongside completing his own part. A good leader is tolerant of ambiguity and needs to remain calm & composed at the time of crisis. Instead of morale getting down, he/she should be able to manage his/her team well, with confidence and a bit of sense of humour for recreational purpose. He/She should be the one who could make the team members learn from the mistakes of competing teams, as well as from their own mistakes.

So, this was what we actually did in our learning program:

Activity=> Reflection=> Learning=> Application=> Activity(New)

Overall, it was fun learning these two main lessons through the adventurous activities and games offered at the outbound training.

We thank the institute for memorable experience of lifetime:)