councils and marketing and challenges all around

I've started my second round of individual director meetings - we meet over dinner or in another informal setting and discuss the year so far, the months to come, challenges and successes. It is interesting to note that almost all of the directors more or less find themselves at this point in time in the same position and with the same challenges. I encourage the directors to share experiences and advice, as they are all struggling with the same issue, and I suggest solutions.

What is this thing they are all dealing with? Team building...Team building, team building, team building... We've had a couple of months now with activities, projects and team meetings, and some things have worked out, and some things haven't, and the one thing they are all struggling with is this thing called team building...

How do you make a team work? And how do you get a team in the first place? I don't have the answers, but I continue to advice my directors to do several things - dare to give space to other people to take initiative, allow people ownership over projects and ideas, recognize the team members as individuals and follow up with them on the individual level, organise interesting quality events that attract new team members. I think the most scary of these is allowing other people to take initiative. We are all so ambitious, we want things to be the the best and be done as soon as possible, but sometimes we have to lean back and realise that sometimes that means not doing things ourselves. I must say though that my directors are good at delegating, this isn't a issue we have a lot, but something that was a hard lesson for me when I first headed a project.

Next council meeting will be special, I'm taking them all out for a big dinner in a private dining room in central London - both directors and deputies, and we're going to talk about how things have gone, and how we can take JCI London to the next level. In a way, all the meetings we've had so far this year has been building up to this meeting. Creating awareness of membership issues and processes, why people join and why they stay, how we brand ourselves, how we promote ourselves. I'm planning to challenge my council a bit, go outside the box, but at the same time create the confidence in each individual that this is something we can achieve.

I'm also very excited about our new marketing budget. I've been sourcing designers online, both friends and strangers, and now we're developing a long list of everything we would like to have made. We plan on creating a new graphic profile for JCI London, a profile that is both in tune with our history and our particularities as a chamber, as well as conforming to the global JCI branding guidelines. Very exciting!

In addition to the JCI London council meeting last night, I also attended the London Chamber of Commerce's council meeting. Every President of JCI London sits on the "grown up" chamber's council, and its a lot of fun!
 Yesterday we learned about the recent election (and it was very timely, as Brown just resigned the minute our briefing started!), and I learned about what goes into running a professional chamber of commerce. Its interesting to see they deal with a lot of the same issues - membership, press and meeting, though apparently on a different level.

I also really enjoy connecting with the individuals on the council, and last night left my head spinning with ideas and possibilities. And about a million lunch dates. And spinning from wine, something that my JCI council had to deal with when I was chairing our meeting right after...Did that positively or negatively affect my marketing proposal? Not so sure, but it went through!