FOL Day 5: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Do you know the answer to that question? What do you want to be when you grow up? Well that is what we discussed on Friday, the last day of Foundations of Leadership training at Crotonville - GE's corporate university training center.

Richard Simpson led a discussion about shaping our careers. He said you should try and describe your leadership style in 3 words. His words were demanding, focused, and energetic. After some thought ...

My leadership style is: passionate, organized, and results-driven.

Next Richard discussed values. We had already discussed the GE Growth Values, so now we were discussing our personal values. I was very surprised when Richard explained that his number one value was his faith!! I was so excited. He is a superbly successful GE executive and he said his values were faith, family, and work, in that order. It was refreshing to hear that because there are many people in this world that put work first in their life and can make it an idol as they pursue success in a worldly sense.

Continuing with the theme of values for the rest of the day, we did an exercise to visualize our personal values. We were given a deck of cards that had values written on them. Through a process of making piles, ranking, dropping and combining we identified our top 5 values. Mine were:

1. Faith
2. Family
3. Health
4. Service
5. Friends

Our instructor then asked for volunteers to share their top value. It was interesting to hear the variety of responses. I boldly raised my hand and shared that faith was number one value. Others that shared did not list faith as their number one but voiced answers such as family, challenge, health, loyalty, and achievement, to name a few.

Team bonding...

Throughout FOL we had many fun games. On this last day we were challenge to create a chair that would hold the tallest person on our team ... out of balloons and masking tape! Then the teams competed to see which team's chair lasted at least 10 seconds without popping any balloons. We successfully lasted the full 10 seconds! Here are two photos; lowering our teammate onto the balloons and then tensely holding our breath during the 10 seconds!