AmChamps 2.1: Team building and mentorship matchmaking

Participants in the AmChamps 2.1 program travelled to Novi Sad to attend two-day team building sessions that featured interactive workshops designed to forge links between the mentors and mentees and provide an opportunity for them to get to know one another and create mentorship pairs.

Day one was devoted to a presentation on leadership and emotional intelligence delivered by Jovana Ranđelović, Business Development Manager at Sinergija Center. The session focused on understanding one’s own emotions and those of others, as well as on behaviors driven by individual beliefs. The presentation specifically focused on distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy emotions, and closed with an accent on understanding empathy and its importance in interpersonal relationships and learning to tell compassion from pity.

After this first session, the attendees took part in Wallbreakers, a workshop facilitated by Dragana Grozdanić, Operations Director, and Nikolina Novaković, HR consultant and psychologist at Atria Group. This company management simulation saw the participants divide into teams to run a company, represented by a bus, where playing pieces on a game board stood for employees with various character traits. The task was to make strategic decisions to successfully transform the business across three key stages – startup, implementation, and anchoring – and the ultimate objective was to retain as many “passengers” as they could on their company “bus”. This activity allowed the participants to better understand the variety of employee profiles and the consequences of management decisions on team dynamics and staff behavior.

Day two saw a workshop facilitated by Nikola Milosavljević, Managing Partner and Senior HR Consultant at HR Fabrika, which was dedicated to developing storytelling and influencing skills. The participants were asked to complete a set of practical tasks, which helped them learn to adapt their communication styles to their audiences and use storytelling and influencing skills and powers as leadership, motivation, and confidence-building tools. A 20-second self-presentation exercise, inspired by a randomly chosen object alongside which each participant had to present themselves, allowed the audience to gain first-hand experience with the importance of contextualization and creative or metaphorical connection with an object. In this process, the mentors played the role of advisors, helping the students articulate their messages.

At the close of the program, the participants took turns scoring each other, after which a matchmaking optimization matrix algorithm was used to divide them into mentorship pairs of one student and one mentor each. The formal announcement of the pairs marked the beginning of a new stage in their partnership, one they will shape through their shared experiences, challenges, and opportunities, fostering mutual collaboration and together striving for success.

See photos from the team building sessions here.