With my position as secretary of the Enactus society, I was asked to attend the Responsible Leader Accelerator training in Birmingham in September. This was the first time I had done something like this, or travelled so far by myself, so this was something I was quite nervous about. To help with my anxiety with the situation, my boyfriend booked a hotel, allowing us to go to Birmingham the night before, so in the morning I got ready and ate breakfast and then walked five minutes to the HSBC bank building where it was being held.
We were signed up and shown to a lift that took us to the third floor, where again we were taken to various tables to collect our timetables for the day and then to a table where we were given some free things to help us with the day, such as notebooks, pens and chocolates, as well as some information on jobs in HSBC, which is a lot more than working in a bank I realised.
We began in a lecture theatre for a welcome talk, introducing us to the main members of the Enactus team who were there, some key people in HSBC as well as some of the other partner companies that were attending to be teaching workshops or giving talks.
The first activity in my day was with Enterprise Rent-A-car, it involved an interactive session on business management, we were put into small groups and asked to imagine we were running one of the branches of enterprise, in charge of the dealership. We basically had to plan out our whole day, including assigning cars to customers and getting them to and from the cars at the right time, as well as answering customer queries and balance the work between the team of drivers. However, the phone would ring and problems would occur, firstly one of the drivers phoned in sick, which meant the remaining driver had a lot more to do in the day, which meant making some decisions, such as offering a better car or a discount if people had to be made late for whatever reason. While the other two members of my team worked on the timetable for the driver, I flicked to the back and thought I could get on with some of the customer queries as I thought we may run out of time to complete these if I left it any later. It was simple things like taking discounts for customers and pricing up other jobs, which actually provided us with a little more information to do with the car types that we could give to certain customers as well.
Overall we did well, it was interesting to hear how other groups handled the same queries too.
After a lunch break where I returned to the hotel quickly to eat, we were sent to the next session, I chose a panel discussion as there were six different people there talking so I thought I could learn quite a lot from this.
They talked about their business and personal lives and how they have overcome issues to build more resilience, which was very informative.
The whole lecture theatre returned and we were all split off into large groups, where we discussed what three qualities in a person and ourselves we think are most important to develop our future careers. I decided for myself as an art student that creativity was definitely one of the highest for me, as I do not think it just applies for creatives but in any industry in terms of problem solving and many other issues. Each group then did a short presentation on which word they chose, I immediately noticed how some of these people who had been to events like this before and working with Enactus societies for a couple of years were so charismatic and confident with public speaking, I felt like I was in front of a business man on the Apprentice, which is something I would love to be able to do myself.
I returned to the hotel and made some notes about the day, I was looking forward to the next day too, as we were so close to the Sealife Centre in Birmingham, we had this planned as I was considering fish and sealife for my module still.
Tahlia Paige 