Staff Development Day today. Supposed to be an 'away' day but it turned into away to the new teaching rooms in the part of the new extension that doesn't belong to the library. Not bad but another time it would be great to go further afield.

We'd filled in various self-assessment sheets before the day so the two guys leading the session could report back to us on our Belbin profiles - interestingly I came out much as I had the first time round a few months back even though I tried to answer the questions in a slightly different way. Of course, I'm still as 'planty' as ever
http://www.belbin.com/downloads/Belbin_Team_Role_Summary_Descriptions.pdf
but when we were lined up according to our preferences was surprised to find that almost everyone one else was at the other end of the room from me (I didn't actually have to go and stand in the corridor for that axis as some suggested!). Still, apparently you don't want too many plants as they're liable to wind other people up. Perhaps less surprisingly almost all of us showed a strong team-worker preference. Well, that's librarians for you. Generally.

Meanwhile it was one of those days full of 'activities'. All of which were interesting, some of which were harder. (Write 6 statements beginning "I am..." that would be helpful for your team to know. And then share them with everyone.) Even the curmudgeonly recalcitrant couple who didn't want to play joined in which I was impressed with.

I got to be planty in the very first team exercise when we were split into three groups (each of the library's three floor teams) and given an exercise to do for half an hour. I'd listened carefully to the instructions and when I realized that we could 'solve' it much quicker with the three teams working as one suggested this to our team leader. She wasn't very convinced but we established from the leaders that no, they'd not said we couldn't do that in the 'rules'. So I persuaded her (the ultimate 'completer finisher') to at least try asking the other teams. But they all wanted to be competitive and 'win'. (I wanted to 'win' just as keenly but saw winning as either breaking out of the assumed rules or doing it quicker than other groups the leaders might have encountered). Of course, the leaders picked up on this at the end and wanted to know why we'd not worked together and then got an excellent teaching point when they asked what we might have done in a real life situation. Lights went on my head when they said that.

One long standing colleague ventured the opinion that of course in real life we'd have worked much more as a united effort across the three teams and it was only in this artificial situation that we'd been competitive. I nearly spluttered. That has not been my experience and before I thought about the fall out ventured to say so. I'm not sure it went down very well.

But at a break H came and found me and thanked me for speaking up because it had been her experience as well. General lack of enthusiasm for new ideas, or a feeling they'd be too difficult, or a decision to pass them up to management where they get lost, or else a decision to adopt the idea from one floor team that's not taken up by the others. Ah well.

I might have got negative points for speaking up in the morning, but redeemed myself in the afternoon when we were doing another half hour exercise to fit jigsaw pieces together. Very early on I clicked what the 'edge' pieces were and as I passed on the information suddenly saw how we could solve the puzzle and just sort of 'took charge' of doing so as there wasn't really time to discuss it. We just managed to solve the problem in the alloted time which pleased everyone no end and gave us a high to finish the day on. Phew.