Remembering Kick-Off: The teamee track

Was it all partying and mascot exchange negotiation? Well, to tell the truth we did lots of work: leaders, teamees, newies, OC, Facis we had long journeys of discussions, workshops and sessions... and to show a little bit of this work Tom Heisterbach is going to tell us about the teamee track :-)

Jessica and Kristina already showed that we had a lot of fun and we really took us not too serious ☺ We were partying hard but we worked harder or at least equally. I will give you here an impression what we did in the Teamee track during the conference.

Between the opening plenary on Thursday afternoon and the Global Village we had our first Teamee session, called “The Milky Way”. After a quick get to know we were divided in 12 groups consisting of 2 people per group. The game was called the milky way and the groups represented the different parts the milk has to pass to arrive at the costumer. So we had a group “cow” and a lot of stations between the cow and the end costumers like farmer, factories and supermarkets.

The aim was to bring the milk to the costumers but also to make money and sell a certain quantity (we had paper money and lists with the quantity of products we own), so we had to buy and sell our stuff. 5 minutes represented one day and we simulated 1 week.




At the end of the week we were quiet “frustrated”, some guys had no money left, some had not reached to sell or buy the quantity they should because prices changed very fast and others were bankrupt. It was very funny to deal but as I mentioned before also frustrating. The overall aim, to bring a certain quantity of milk to the end consumers was not reached.

This showed us, involving our emotions and feeling to be a part of the situation, that it is really necessary to work together to reach a common goal, to be a unit for satisfying everyone in the system and also to reach a high quality concerning the output.

AIESEC is such a system, an organization, and we are selling our products. We have to work together to reach a high quality and to be competitive in the market. In the first session we became aware of this problem AIESEC Switzerland faces.

On Friday we did not meet in our group because the Teamee track and the Leader track were working together in a workshop also concerning the quality question of AIESEC (s.o. will write a summary on that session). Afterwards we were in the external workshops and AISEC dialogues, so we met on Saturday again.

Saturday consisted of 4 parts for the Teamees.

In the first session, now aware of the problems AIESEC Switzerland is confronted with, we discussed under the topic “one step further” how to improve the quality of our LCs, what to change and what to do to increase exchanges. My opinion is that it is necessary to offer a “package of workshops” (rhetorical training, presentation etc.) to the Newies after joining so that they get some skills to represent AIESEC as a qualitatively high organization with good products (us). This is more a long-term attempt to change the formation structure than the short-term attempt to work on some issues concerning the actual quality. I spread this idea quiet well in a lot of personal talks as well as in the discussion groups I participated. A result was for example a topic concerning this in the AIESEC dialogues.

The second part was called “take your pick” and the Teamees had the chance to discuss and to ask questions to experts about different leadership positions like VP, LCP, MC, OCP, Trainer. Afterwards the Facis explained us the different development possibilities, conferences like LDS (Leadership development seminar), TTT (Train the trainer) on national and international level. I can’t remember all the topics but if you want to know s.th. to a special topic I would be happy to explain it to you ☺ For me personally this session wasn’t very interesting because I did already knew most of the things but I think in general it was quiet useful for the Teamees.

The third session was called “Intern interaction” and interns offered us the possibility to talk to them personally about different topics concerning their country. I missed this part because I got to know a really interesting person from Netherlands. We did some small talk and then lost our self in a real intelligent conversation, maybe the best I had in the last year. Quiet amazing, AIESEC brings people together. ☺



Lost in the conversation we did not see the others around us leaving, so I had to find them, already on their way to a grassland for the fourth part of the day. I found one of my Facis and joined his group. The session was called “the bottom line” and we were ask to write down some answers to questions that confronted us with our self, our aims, weaknesses and forced us to search and fix some plans for the future. This was a self-reflecting part. I really liked this because it’s necessary to improve oneself, to learn; it was useful and interesting.

Sunday we met, after the “skill” workshops, to the goodbye session. We sat together in groups and reflected about the conference. What was good, what bad, what did we learn what do we want to do now and in the future. We fixed a contract with one other person in which there were 3 different things fixed that we want to work on or change. We fixed also some concrete dates and the contract partner will send us an email at this date to control our progress and promises. We also recorded with the Facis a video of our self in which we described our self in one year. This video will be send to us in one year, so we can compare who we are and what we wanted to be today one year ago.

In general the conference was very useful for me. The both main parts, discussing the quality problem of AIESEC Switzerland and on the other hand improving skills and doing self reflections were really cool. I learned a lot concerning both topics and I am really happy that I was there.

Beside this what I called the two main streams of “my” conference there was of course more. We LIVED DIVERSITY and got to know a lot of different people and their different ways of thinking; we were proactive and ACTED AS LEADERS, we ENJOIED PARTICIPATION - we liked to be a part of AIESEC; we were STRIVING FOR EXCELLENCE in every single situation we were – dancing, discussing or flirting; we DEMONSTRATED INTEGRITY by partying hard but being present in the workshops. We have maybe to improve to ACT SUSTAINABLE but no one is perfect, we’re just people ;)

Thank you very much – especially the Newies - for living this values and making this conference to a really great experience for me and all the other participants,

Tom