Airtricity Europe

Annual Conference Intervention

Listening, thinking and communicating.

Maximillion was commissioned to deliver a half day team development intervention for the Generation & Operations Division of Airtricity, as a key component of their two day Annual Conference. Airtricity is a world leading renewable energy company developing and operating wind farms in Europe and Asia.  As an integrated utility, the company is both a generator and supplier of green electricity and currently supplies green electricity to approximately 35,000 commercial customers in Ireland.

Event Detail

  • Venue: Crowne Plaza Hotel, Dublin, Ireland
  • Format & Style: Facilitated conference intervention incorporating brain dominance personal mapping. Brain dominance involves a four quadrant model of thinking preferences – analytical thinking, sequential thinking, interpersonal thinking & imaginative thinking
  • Group: 110 participants – a multidisciplinary mix of specialists from across G&OD

Objectives

The Maximillion response was designed to meet the following requirement, as outlined by the senior team:

“The two items we want to cover are Personality Types and their significance in a company and team environment. Following on from that, we want to do a workshop based activity on Active Listening. This latter item is based on feedback we got from our seminar last year – it was considered to be one of the most important tools of communication by team members and we want to focus on this in response to this feedback

How can active listening help us to interact effectively with our colleagues, management and suppliers?

How can active listening help us to be better at what we do and to deliver on our business objectives more successfully?

Outline & approach

The day incorporated plenary sessions, breakout groups, pairwork and an experiential activity component – “House of Fun!”

  • Ice breaker: Are you listening? Lively activity using sound, audio visual and other sensory awareness materials
  • How does our thinking style affect how we react? Using brain dominance profiling, this session created an understanding of how often we find ourselves in situations of misunderstanding and uncertainty about how to influence situations. An awareness of our behaviour and the expectations others have of us is key to shifting this paradigm.
  • How can we develop our skills and increase our awareness? Experiential activity that tested the ability of teams to plan, listen, learn and communicate. This session built on the brain dominance concepts enabling participants to review their own preferred style and to practice communicating with and influencing others.

Outcome

“It opened people’s eyes to brain dominance types – both their own and others. It sparked debate and interest with people trying to guess what quadrant others belonged to. The activity “House of Fun” in particular was a real hit – especially for this group”.

Feedback

“The session met our expectations and we were satisfied that the key learning outcomes were reached. Sandy – excellent, Keith – very strong on crowd control and direction. & Jane – very professional in my dealings with her particularly for arrangements and details”.

Catherine Hannon, Business Projects Manager