National conference

Last weekend, I went to one of our national conferences, SAM (Strategic Autum Meeting).
This is a conference where all the executive boards from 48 Local Committees come together to have a mid term meeting. There where around 300 people attending this conference.

For me this conference was so extraordinary because of the people. Meeting all the people that have taken the challenge to be in the executive board, to challenge themselves as a team to lead their local committees.

Most of the people I had already met on the first national conference at the beginning of our term, the NKK (National KickOff Conference). Then began our journey and now we met again. Every one of them has gained experiences in the past 6 months; some of them were great and some were not so good, but this is excatly what made me went to be a local committee president. I wanted to challenge myself. To grow futher. Until now I, as well as all the others, have grown in areas such as:

leading a team, celebrating success, acepting failure, facing problems one after another, feeling tired of the job, feeling not understood, feeling hungry for more etc.

And we are just in the middel of our journey, still 6 months to go to gain more experience and to grow further.

"Why not?" are the words that really touched me on this conference. A very challenging statement from our Member Commite President Gesa.

When was the last time you challenged yourself?

Working in an invisible team

Together with around 14 other AIESECers (Ken and Johannes are two of them) I am working in a national task force that is basically doing market research to better position AIESEC towards our customers. (Sounds like serious economics - and it is. Stay tuned here or follow the wiki in our intranet myaiesec.net for contents.)

Working in a taks force is one possibility (not only for LCPs, but for every member!) of many to leave the local level for a while and work on the national or international one. Now the special thing about this team is that it works completely virtually. That was a new challenge for me: Of course I use mail, skype, spradsheets, wikis etc on a daily base. But relying completely on them was new to me. Conflicts can come up much faster when you do not see your opponent. And we all learned a lot of small things, such as: More than two telephone conferences a day are really tiring. Call all 50 Local Committees individually if you want to get answers. The station of Hagen has no W-LAN, Hannover does. Virtual irony does not work. Some virtual rooms for telephone conferences tend to kick you out from time to time, others don´t. Google Docs are really cool, but when importing excel sheets, the design will be lost... I could go on much longer.

We also learned that working together in such a big team only works, when you know and trust each other. I am really thankfull to be allowed with this great team, coordinated by the one and only Arne.

Nicolas

Picture taken on our kick-off in Bonn - only a part of the team could be there, unfortunately.