This year, the Materialise Malaysia office turned into a fully-fledged teenager as the team celebrated 17 years of existence.
When looking back at those years, it was obvious that every triumph and success experienced by the team was due to its members and most significantly, the people managers mentoring and driving the team!
At Materialise Malaysia, we strive to maintain an open environment which contributes to effective leadership development. We started with two people managers, and currently have 18 people managers that support the steady growth of our office from 11 to over 130 employees today.
Over the past three years, we have been supporting the development of our people managers to facilitate the growth of our employees and office. So how do we ensure our people managers have the skills to do this?
Beginning this year, we held a co-creation exercise where our people managers were invited to work out the focus of their development among the six leadership competencies. Team activation was one of the needs that the group identified, and we chose a beautiful day in April to have our first People Manager Team Building.
Here’s how the day looked like!
First up was a game of musical chairs with fun ice breaking questions. An all-time favourite for any age, it was a fun way to warm up and get to know each other.
We also discovered that our people managers had a hidden talent for drawing with their knees.
Trust is the foundation to any relationship, and it is good to realize that sometimes we need others to support us. That led to the next activity: our people managers were blindfolded and needed to be guided through a room full of obstacles (or mines, which could “explode” if bumped into) by the rest of the team.
It was a rewarding journey to achieve our goals together as a team, and we not only strengthened the bonds between us but learned that together we can achieve much more than as individuals!
As Sales Manager Kelvin Wee said of his experience,
“The team building activity was very good, inspiring and encouraging. We got to interact with the different people managers in a more casual way. It told us a lot more about each person than we would have known in a formal setting. It also helped us open up to one another and get to know one another better. I was pleasantly surprised with the interactivity and openness of the team. Great event and looking forward to having it on a regular (yearly) basis!”
