TOWER BUILDING : LEARNING WITH A DIFFERENCE

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”   Thomas Edison

Tower building exercise is a very unique and effective way to learn various Principles of Management if you look at it from the right perspective.

WHAT IS TOWER BUILDING EXERCISE ??

According to me it is a Team Building exercise which gives the participants first hand experience of how Management styles effects the performance of the Team.

Check out this video here and you will get some insight into Tower Building. Here in this video the tower building exercise is been performed in a class.


TAKE AWAY FROM TOWER BUILDING EXERCISE....

 It gives you a chance to see different managerial styles in action

I ll explain this point with the example from our class.Our Professor Dr. Prasad, full of exuberance and a very different style, comes to a student in class and say..."Oh I love this guy, great smile and very enthusiastic" and then ask him "chal jaa mere sher samne jaa ke blocks bana le"(go my boy build the blocks in front of the class).
The guy will leap on the opportunity as he has already been filled with all the confidence he requires and will put more than 20 block on one another in a flash.

This shows that  if provided with right motivation and perspective one can achieve more than he or she is capable of.

If you are still not able to get it then watch this , this video will present a different view of motivation in management.

It generates live, behavioral data that you and your group can really work on.

 "You there boy come in front and perform this tower building exercise"


 When you do it in front of your class where 70 to 80 people are staring at you consistently and someone is saying to the person sitting next to him  "arrey assan hai yaar , ek ke upar ek lagana hee to hai"(its quite easy all you have to do put one block on another)  on top of it  your professor who is putting all the efforts to try and teach you something out of it comes and stand right behind you to see what you are conjuring up on that podium.Suddenly you will start seeing those steady hands of yours trembling and the blocks slipping on one another.

So while you are feeling like that cloth which is been beaten constantly on a rock of Dhobi Ghat , observers of this activity are learning something very important. A simple task like putting a block on one another turned out to be a crucifying experience for you because of the environmental settings you have been put into leading towards the fact that when expectations are set and they are set high that is when pressure gets on to your nerves.


Learning From this example:
This exercise  helped me to understand that setting of goal prior to any task is a very tricky business if done properly it can lead you to perform better than you thought and if not then you will find yourselves struggling to put  blocks on one another with your trembling hands.



One more thing to learn out of this exercise as a whole is that when you start looking at  things differently you can squeeze a lot of juice out of it . Example here is the Tower building exercise in itself which is nothing more than block building but if looked out from the perspective of management learning it has a lot of fundas hidden in it.

"You can not turn a bathroom singer into a music maestro but then you can always get a radio channel where they play songs from bathroom singers only"

Name : Mohit Sharma

Roll No : 218