Cartherics recently held a company offsite at the RACV Healesville Country Club and Resort. Nestled in the beautiful Yarra Valley just over an hour from Melbourne, the venue provided a relaxing escape for the Cartherics team to engage, connect and grow as individuals and a team.

We heard from motivational speakers, took part in a personal preference profiling exercise and embarked on team-building challenges – a jam-packed two days providing invaluable learnings, concepts and tools that can help us to be successful.

Sandy and Julie Cameron from Meredith Dairy shared the story behind their success. It’s clear that many challenges are common across small business, irrespective of the industry and that perseverance, belief and understanding the ‘why’ as well as the ‘what’ of the business are critical attributes for success.

Julie Cameron discussed the importance of businesses having ambitious ethical, environmental and community objectives as well as ambitious business and financial objectives. Meredith Dairy has demonstrated that it is possible for a small Australian company to take on the world and succeed.

An important part of the offsite was to learn about ourselves and each other. We all have our personal preferences for how we operate.  This doesn’t mean that we can’t operate in other ways, just that it takes more effort to do so, and we need to be mindful of the preferences of those around us.

To explore this, we all undertook the Myers-Briggs personal preference profile. Across the company, about 40% of people fall into two M-B groups but we also have a good mix across most other groups. This means that while one style of operating might fit for many, it doesn’t fit for all and it’s important to understand ourselves and also our colleagues.

After learning about our personal preferences, we learnt a lot more about each other’s sartorial preferences by dressing up for a formal “blue and silver” dinner.  And, to get the competitive juices flowing, each of the four dinner tables competed in a fast-paced, gameshow style trivia quiz.

An offsite wouldn’t be complete without team building challenges so it was onto the ‘Pipeline Challenge’. The aim of the challenge was for two independent teams collaborating to create a 12 meter long pipeline capable of transporting a ball bearing from start to end, driven purely by gravity.  This was a tougher, more complex exercise than what we anticipated but, despite this, one team successfully completed the challenge. It became clear that the principles of good project management, i.e., defining the problem, breaking it down into component parts, establishing the goal, etc., apply just as much to team building challenges as they do to drug development.

Ian Nisbet, Chief Operating Officer at Cartherics summed up his thoughts on the offsite this way: “While appreciation of the importance of teamwork, recognizing and valuing our differences, having an inspiring “why” as well as “what” for our company, were important insights from the weekend, I also reflect on the underlying theme for the offsite.  We’re on a journey together to create something special at Cartherics.  We have a fantastic team of talented and highly motivated people.  We can do amazing things together.”

We are Cartherics