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Seeing Your Team As A City By John Sarvay | March 5, 2010

 

 

During a recent day with the marketing team from the Richmond Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Center (RMCVB), we explored team dynamics from a variety of perspectives –– starting with an energetic and revealing exercise involving dozens of balloons. After some conversation and activity about team climate and the role that our individual personalities and an organization's leadership play in shaping that climate, the RMCVB team began to identify their best attributes.

Because their primary role is to market and celebrate the Richmond region, we then invited them to begin thinking about those team attributes from an urban perspective. What cities around the world embody similar attributes as your team? If your team was a city, what design attributes -- infrastructure, architecture, etc. -- would be critical to its construction?

 

 

Once they'd nailed down their identity -- both as a team and as an urban area -- we took them into the printmaking room of the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, where education director Aimee Joyaux and I helped them turn all of the ideas and concepts into a team-generated map.

It was an exhausting day for everyone, but apparently an exhilarating one, as well -- I'll be facilitating a retreat for the entire RMCVB staff (marketing, sales and administration) later in March.

Time to get more balloons.

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