The day I was able to monitor mr. Sletten was a very educative day. What I found especially striking was the way mr. Sletten treated his staff. 

This day was divided in to multiple activities. Therefore, I had the chance to see the general director operate in his many task areas. We had some good conversations on how a meeting should go (short and effective) and how to treat staff, cope with disease of staff and people management in total. We came to the conclusion that it really is necessary to show appreciation towards the staff. In this way they will feel appreciated and will want to work harder for you (+ decreasing absenteeism). This means that mr. Sletten goes around the factory terrain by bike and by foot, in order to meet as many workers as possible. 

Another very important factor was safety. The entire production is planned around safety. A decrease in production could be verified by explaining that a safety risk has been eliminated for example. 

Shortly said, as a manager you really have to be excellently with people. If you are unable to work with people, cope with their problems, see their strengths and weaknesses, you are not fit to be a manager. 

Having said this, it means that I really have to work on discovering talents, strengths and weaknesses of other people. I think the Talent and Development learning groups are an excellent way of discovering these. 

In the past I have already had to work in groups that I would normally not have chosen myself. However, it has also enlightened me because I was able to cope with clashing personalities and people not willing to cooperate. On the other hand had I rather worked with people whom I can trust and now will do their tasks as asked. 

If I look at myself, I can clearly find a few strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A good strength of me is that I have a good 'knowledge of people'. I do not need very long to see if it would work out good with someone in a team or not. Therefore, it is also easier for me to create a good team. 

A weakness however is that I find it hard to work with people who are not so talented in specific areas. I always tend to say that I can work excellently with people who are not so smart, but I hate working with people who are dumb. I think that there is a major difference in these two words. However, as a manager you also have to be able to work with those people and that could be a weakness as well as a threat for me. Only one solution for this: work on it. As you know by now I am very much goal-oriented so this clearly is a goal to work on.

An opportunity for me is to develop my skill of 'knowing people' in the Talent learning groups. In the talent session about talents, I had everyone's talent correct, apart from one. I think that this illustrates my skill here. 

A threat is, as I said, that I am not really able to work with people who I cannot 'use' or who do not have the same attitude towards work as me. As you can see in one of my first pages, I think that the future only belongs to those who work on it today. I have a great working ethos, even though I say it myself, but when I speak to people about my work, they often tell me the same. 

To round off, I think that IBM can really help me to learn to work with people of different cultures and with different visions and ideas. The thing is, that even though I love working with international people, their mindset is really different than the one I am used to. Therefore, I think this programme is helping me in developing 'people skills' very much.