Is it about your New Year’s resolutions, or raising your kids, or teaching kids, or setting goals for your employees – if you want them/yourself to succeed, you need to set the SMART goals. Not just any. Never heard of? No worries, just keep reading and I will try to guide you.
Learning objective: by the end of reading this article you will be able to define the goals for you and other people, using the SMART approach.
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Browsing through one of the online forums I noticed someone asking “How to create barcodes in Excel?”. Among many answers he got, the most popular were:
I digged a bit into all of them and learned a few things here and there, but still was asking myself: is it possible to create barcodes in Excel without VBA, without installing fonts, without passing through other apps (eg. Word)?
And the answer is: YES, we can create barcodes directly in Excel, using only built-in features, but that requires some preparation.
Here is how.
How is your team doing these days? Do they trust each other? Do they understand their needs?
Do you remember that movie with Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor… What was that… Oh yes, “See No Evil, Hear No Evil“? (Btw. Kevin Spacey was also there). Without knowing each other, with some limitations, they had to solve their problem(s). So here comes the Guide activity (of course depending on your mood feel free to call it by the movie title) and its variations.
Well, it’s for sure nice when participants introduce themselves. But sometimes we need to bring some life into introduction part of our training, e.g. for ice-breaking. Or any other reason of course. So here is one of my introducing activities: Random questions.
Training Manager seeking new challenges. Yes, that’s me.
“Szewc bez butów chodzi”… It’s a Polish proverb. Wondering what that means?
“We failed…”, “What went wrong?”, “We had a great vision!”, “We had a great strategy”, “What happened?”…
I tell you what happened: nothing. And that is the keyword of your failure.
What was the first thing you did today, just after reaching your office? No, I’m not asking about that coffee at the cafeteria nor the one at the machine. I will not be guessing too much I believe, if I say: you started your PC and opened Outlook your emails.
I tell you something: you need to talk to me about your habits (my email is up). Or just keep reading.
The tallest tower + modifications
This activity is well know: split participants into groups of 4-5, give them 1m of scotch tape, some pages from newspapers, scissors. Task: build the tallest tower.
Variations:
+ they should be able to move the tower at least by [X] m. (you decide) after it’s built, you can provide some paper clips if you want
+ make teams of 4, each 2 pairs should have their left+right hand tied together (2 people connected by 1 left and 1 right hand, so it looks like they have 2 free hands and 1 common); now they really need to collaborate (skills: team building, working with limitations and collaboration)
+ as above – make teams of 4 but now tie hands only of 1 pair in each team; blindfold the other pair in each team (now in each team you have: 1 connected pair, 2 blindfolded people); the connected pair will use scissors and also needs to instruct blindfolded guys; this version is nice, funny and also difficult as team needs to make sure, that blindfolded people are not just standing and waiting for the other pair to do everything (skills: team building, communication, working with limitations, collaboration).
Once again we are about to start our session. And once again we need participants to introduce themselves. If you are looking for new introduction activity – you are in the right place. This time – Random presentation.
The easiest way of starting the session is simply to ask participants to introduce themselves (Ok, you can just start session even without that). Standard, simple, quick. For sure will work in some environments, but what if you are looking for more, without going too far? The answer is: Presenting in pairs.
