• The interactive leadership weekeend

The organisation

Mifa specialises in the extrusion of magnesium profiles and aluminium profiles. Mifa fully-finished precision products with dimensional tolerances from ± 0.02 mm. Employing 270 colleagues, Mifa is located in Venlo and is part of the listed Aalberts Industries.

 

The case

Over the last couple of years, Mifa has made the transition of being a product-oriented organisation to a customer-oriented business. In order to be able to continue providing high-quality profiles as a fast-growing organisation, it is essential for colleagues to be able to find one another and to bring up ideas proactively.

 

The collaboration

For self-initiative to bubble out of the entire organisation and to intensify collaboration between departments, I facilitated the two-day leadership weekend of Mifa. During a number of interactive workshop exercises, the 35 managers experienced: how to get the best out of your people – about motivation; what Mifa’s purpose is; how you can give trust (why making mistakes works); and how you can really collaborate.

 

The feedback

  • “An insightful weekend with eye-openers, applicable in practice.”
  • “A relaxed and positive atmosphere that stimulated our teambuilding.”

 

The results

  • Every manager worked on their self-formulated actions with their team.
  • The teams collaborated more intensively and with more focus. The insight of the ‘really working together’ exercise is still being used as an image/symbol of first thinking through the approach before getting going together.
  • Following the award for the “most insightful mistake” more colleagues bring up new ideas.
  • The exercises from the interactive Leadership weekend are the basis to develop our way of working together further.

 

The reference

Rob van Oene, Managing Director of Mifa

“In order to be able to work together well, it is important that everyone looks into the mirror and realises what behaviour they display and how this impacts others. As a result of experiencing the exercises during the Leadership Weekend, we became aware of the kind of behaviour we display and how some behaviour actually inhibits collaboration instead of stimulating it. In particular the exercise where we had to recreate our collaborative process with thread and rods in the grass, characterised what our way of working together was like at that time. After the weekend, we have started improving our collaborative process step by step. For us collaboration is all about making sure the customer comes first, which leads to more customer insight for all colleagues and eventually to more customer satisfaction.”