Browse Topics
- Before enrolling
- Enrolling
- Support for Academics, HR Managers & Recommenders
- Requirements and marksheets
- Submitting work and applications
- Team Member issues
- Team Leader issues
- Leadership Coaches issues
- Business Mentor issues
- Awards, certificates, micro-credentials and ceremony
FAQs
GEE-Free
The GEE-Free has a wide range of participants:
* About 2/3 of participants are in university classes or work leadership training programmes that are built around the Global Enterprise Experience
* The remaining 1/3 are volunteers who are doing it for the learning, networking, and recognition on their CV
* About 60% are undergraduate students, 20% are graduate students (usually MBA), and 20% are in the workforce (usually in management positions).
* The GEE-Free is completely free. We are grateful for any donations to support our work.
GEE-Plus
GEE-Plus costs USD 1,210 for individuals and we have institutional agreements for multiple enrolments. Here are some considerations:
* The programme is best suited to masters level students or managers in the workplace.
* About 96% of GEE-Plus enrolees choose to take the team leadership offer, the remaining 4% choose to be a team member but make use of the workshops, training materials, and personal coaching.
* The leadership role is tough! A talented US military manager with a PhD who enrolled for three years. In the first two years she was a team member who excelled with winning the GEE Peer-Leader Award. In her third year she took on the leadership role. She was startled that the leadership role was such a big step up in terms of time, commitment, responsibility, learning and insights.
Leadership Coach
The Leadership Coach programme costs USD 1,210 for individuals, and we have institutional agreements for multiple enrolments. Here are some considerations:
* Leadership Coaches must have the mana to engender respect from the GEE Team Leaders
* The coaches are usually:
managers in the workforce, or
people trained in coaching who wish to increase their skills, coaching experience and/or gain a coaching qualifications, or
masters students, or
staff in organisation seeking to bring in a coaching culture, or
top performers in previous Global Enterprise Experience contests.
* Coaches must have access to a private space and reliable internet connection.
* Enrolment numbers are strictly limited to 56 people.
Business Mentor
The Business Mentor programme costs USD 1,210 for individuals, and we have institutional agreements for multiple enrolments. It is an invitation only programme as enrolees need strong skills in business and personal mana. Enrolments are strictly limited to 20 people. Contact us if you are interested in being invited to enrol. The programme is useful for gaining skills and experience in:
* Mentoring small businesses and start ups
* University lecturing and tutoring to gain skills in fostering student-led learning and insights
* Facilitation skills for individual and group learning
* Strategic thinking skills for starting new ventures
The Global Enterprise Experience encourages all participants to be peer-leaders – that is taking joint responsibility for team creativity, team productivity, team problem solving, team unity, and coaching others to succeed.
Log in (http://enrol.geebiz.org/Questionnaire.aspx) with your main email address and your ID number.
Below is the questionnaire, or you can access it as pdf here.
There are four ways you can step up to become the overall team leader:
- You are a member of a sponsoring organisation. The team leaders are appointed before the start of the contest and receive training and support.
- You enrolled in the GEE-Plus programme for USD 1,210 so receive priority rights to any team leader roles
- You are invited to be a co-leader during the contest by your team leader because of your high performance. As a co-leader you will be given access to all of the same materials and support as the leaders. If you are keen to be invited to co-lead, then you may like to let your leader know.
- Sometimes the designated team leader fails to fire. If so, promptly reach out to the leader to see if there is an issue, offer help, alert the
Leadership is a big step up from being a team member, but it is also very rewarding.
The GEE-Free programme is completely free. About 80% of participants are in the free programme. They are team members and receive emailed guidance during the contest.
The remaining 20% of participants are in the GEE-Plus programme that costs USD1,210. They receive full training, personal coaching, business mentoring, networking, and access to leading roles.
Details of the what is on offer for GEE-Free and GEE-Plus can be found here and is also shown below.
Yes. We understand that semester start dates are sometimes later than the last day for enrolment. Let us l know if you need to enrol late.
We build the teams two days before the launch date, so this is the final time that we can accept enrollees. They must have responded to our email with submitting their bio and completing their Peer-Leader Self-Evaluation. Neither of these requirements take much time, but the enrollee does need to receive our email and respond promptly. So late enrolments put pressure on you to ensure your enrollees have our email address (deb [at] windeaters.co.nz) in their safe sender list, and promptly respond to our emailed request for their bio and self evaluation.
You are able to view our live database to keep track of any missing enrolments.
You are asked to submit a bio after you have enrolled. Your bio is visible to all contestants. Once the contest has started, your team leader will share the bios of your eight team members with you. Your bio aims to help your team to get started quickly, knowing a bit about each other.
Upload a brief bio to share with other participants. It needs to include three things:
A bit about yourself – such as your experiences, interests, aspirations, challenges, and things you love.
What you can offer your team – such as skills in creativity, marketing, accounting, writing, editing, graphic design, online research, field research, finance, economic evaluation, or understanding local issues.
One initial thought on a group, a need, a sector, or a UN Sustainable Development Goal that interests you and may serve as a focus for your team - such as youth, people with disabilities, women, tackling corruption, migrant workers, environment, ending modern slavery, finance, tourism, farming, health, education, clean water, sanitation, energy, plastics, oceans, justice, 3D printing, drones, blockchain … or something else.
Log in (http://enrol.geebiz.org/Login.aspx) with your email address and your ID number to upload your bio file.
Send an email and text message to the team leader initially. Their details are on your excel spreadsheet. Assume that there is a good reason that they are missing - there usually is. Please urgently contact Dr Deb Gilbertson, deb [at] windeaters.co.nz to let her know.
In the meantime, please step up to take peer-leadership actions. Reach out to team colleagues both as a group and individually. If you have not heard from the team leader within two days, then you and/or other team members will need to take on leadership responsibilities. Send an email to your designated leader to let them know what you are doing. You can ask Deb to add you to all the training and support systems available to leaders. Keep Deb informed of what is happening in your team.
Training: Enjoy interactive webinars on leadership skills, personal development, innovation, creating a business concept proposal, social enterpreneurship, and the UN SDGs. The sessions are interactive and experiential learning for your team challenges. Get the full details here.
Peer-Support Workshops: Share your issues, learning and insights with other team leaders from around the world in facilitated network sessions. Receive guidance from colleagues and professionals.
Personal coaching: One-on-one coaching helps you form deep insights into yourself, align with your goals, amplify your strengths, and overcome the blockages that sabotage your best intentions. YOu can raise issues with your coach like fostering team engagement, dealing with conflict, stimulating creativity, or your own personal challenges around confidence, leadership, and making tough decisions. Book times for 50-minute online sessions that suit you with your chosen coach.You can book as many sessions as you like. We recommend getting weekly coaching.
Business mentoring: One-on-one business mentoring enables you to get help with technical challenges like business strategy, marketing, economic evaluation, and making the idea happen. Mentors use more coaching skills than advice giving, to help you develop a quality team proposal. Book times for 50-minute online sessions that suit you with your chosen mentor.You can book as many sessions as you like.
Just-in-time email guidance: You will receive emails through the contest with guidance on the challenges as they are about to arise.
Microsoft Teams GEE Leader Platform: You are sent a link to join the Microsoft Teams platform for GEE Team Leaders. Access the training, resources, powerpoints, and bookings through this link. We do not routinely provide videos of the workshops as participants can raise personal challenges in the sessions. We aim to video any lecture segments. We encouage you to ask questions, and respond to others questions and comments on the site.
FAQs: Check out the FAQs where common issues are often raised.
Programme Director support: If you are having issues that need additional support, contact the Programme Director, Deb Gilbertson.
No. The Global Enterprise Experience is open those in the workforce, voluntary agencies, tertiary education, or parenting. Top date participants have come from 900 universities and 440 organisations.
The number of enrolees we can accept from one university or organisation depends on the programme and country. Please check if you have large numbers enroling.
Team Member in either the GEE-Free or the GEE-Plus Programme
New Zealand 10
Netherlands 10
China 30
All other countries 150
GEE-Plus Team Leader
All countries 50
GEE Leadership Coach
All countries 40
GEE Business Mentor
All countries 20
Please add deb[at]windeaters.co.nz to your safe sender list. You will need to used the "at" symbol instead of the letters [at]. We write it this way to prevent robots trolling our website for email addresses.
This site provides guidance on adding email addresses to your safe sender list.
Talk to your team leader first, if you are able to. Then, if there is still an issue, contact Dr Deb Gilbertson, deb [at] windeaters.co.nz. If your team leader is missing, please contact Deb urgently.
The due dates are shown below and are also on these links - GEE-Free, GEE-Plus, GEE Leadership Coach
It is emailed to deb [at] windeaters.co.nz with the label Team XXX Proposal.
The proposal is on time so long as it is the due date anywhere in the world. New Zealand is the first country in the world to see the sun, so the due date will be 11pm on the following day New Zealand time. You can check out dates and time zones for all of your team members on Meeting Planner – Find best time across Time Zones (timeanddate.com)
Strategies to Foster Engagement
There are often very good reasons for absence. If you have five participants engaged you are doing well.
In past years we have had deaths in the family, other family crises, illness (including malaria and yellow fever), injury (including having to type one handed), debilitating depression and suicide attempts, war (Armenia), devastating earthquake (Nepal), campus riots (Bangladesh), very limited access to the internet especially in the weekend (Pacific Islands, and many parts of Africa), Rwandan genocide remembrance week that shuts down the country and university, expensive internet, slow internet, elections that lead to dropping internet speed to slow dial-up to prevent protesters engaging with each other (Iran), elections that lead to curfew and participants imprisoned for breaking curfew to talk to team mates (Nigeria), murder, robbery and assault in cheap late night internet café (Nigeria), girls who are accused of being prostitutes because they go out at night to an internet café (Pakistan), hospitalisation (there will be at least four this contest), medivac out of country, travel home in holidays to remote village without internet (Colombia and Africa), travel, exams, other pressures in life, electricity shedding for 14 hours per day (Nepal), electricity collapse across the country for nine days (Nauru), lost or stolen cellphone, damaged or corrupted computer, emails lost in junk mail folder, corrupted email account, and using the alternative instead of the main email address.
There is not much you can do about these issues. However, you can do something about people who are anxious to respond.
Some cultures are flummoxed when the team gets into business before knowing each other. Others are shy of making a mistake. Their reflections describe how they waited for a week before engaging with the team because they were not sure what to say. Others are convinced that their ideas are not creative enough, so avoid saying anything. Some don’t clearly understand the instructions, in part because the instructions are vague or not easily understood by a person with English as a second language. There can also be a gender issue where women feel they need to be passive to not cause offence. And there can be an issue with team members avoiding making suggestions because they do not wish to seem like they are usurping the leader’s role. Some countries are much more hierarchical, so they expect the leader to be strident. Leaders from some countries see themselves as servants of the team, and feel being forthright makes them appear too bossy. Some reflections from participants in developing countries expect their ideas and education to be dismissed by people from developed countries.
So, what are some strategies for fostering engagement, or dealing with missing members?
- Get team members to know you and each other.
- Write to them individually - perhaps drawing on the qualities and potential they displayed in the bio
- Send a text (numbers are on the end of the spreadsheet).
- Contact their academic or recommender (email at end of spreadsheet). I suggest you copy them into your email to the academic. E.g. “I am concerned that we have not heard from xyz who is in my GEE team. Please can you encourage them to contribute, or we will not be able to continue to include them in the team. Or if you know of a good reason for their absence like illness can you let me know please?”
- Role model what you want.
- If the team cannot produce the quality of creative ideas that gets everybody excited, then you need to add some. Include ideas that resonate with their world view, or may be located in their country. Have a look at a sample email to foster creativity that is in the Team Leaders Resource folder.
- Be very specific about action steps. E.g. "Hey guys let's contribute ideas" is hopeless. Make it specific, make it small steps to respond to at first, and make it obvious how to respond. Perhaps ask for issues first, or something from their experience.
- Recognise contributions, including providing specific feedback on the behaviour e.g. "Thank you for your fascinating insights on issues in your country", or "Thank you for stepping up to be the first to share an idea", or "I appreciate your thoughtfulness in taking others' ideas and stretching them", or "What a creative brain! It is so good having you on our team pushing us out of our comfort zone", or "I know what a challenge it is for you to get to a good internet connection - thank you for your commitment in finding a way to contribute to the team effort."
- Paint the picture, put people in it, and make them heroes in their own story. E.g. “Thanks Daniel for the great description of the issues for widowed women in Rwanda. It seems there may be an option for us to have a project to help create a series of women’s coops across Rwanda that gives these women the power, support and resources they need to survive. Daniel, can you use your deep knowledge of the issue, and networks to see what would be beneficial?”
- Write requests out to everyone, making them look like potential achievers in the eyes of their colleagues. People usually step up to the perception. So if you are saying things like, "C'mon guys. We are falling behind. We must get at least something to work on for the team project", then you are projecting a perception of laziness and failure. People like to be part of a success story, not a failing story.
- Keep trying. And then keep trying. Leadership is primarily about trying and caring.
- Provide some face saving way if they are failing to deliver. E.g. "perhaps my emails are getting caught in your spam folder."
- Ask for help from the slightly more active members. E.g. "You have been a stalwart member of this team. Please, I need your help, again. Can you post xyz to help break the drought."
- Threaten with exclusion from the team (but not yet!). You will need to make sure that you have done everything that you can do first. I would tend to put it, “Please do not put me in a position of leaving your name off the report, as you would no longer be eligible for prize money, awards, the certificate or letter of commendation. However in fairness to the rest of the team, you will need to contribute to the team effort, to have your name included. I will need to make a decision on your inclusion over the next few days.”
- Get tough. E.g. “If I have not received at least one useful idea from you before May 5 and meaningful contribution to the team effort then your name will not be on the team report”.
- Get decisive. E.g. “In fairness to the team we are not able to include your name on the team report”.
We will email you an invoice. The enrolment form asks for person, organisation and email to send the invoice to.
If you have fixed price agreement with us for a number of enrolees, then we will provide you with a coupon code. Please ask your sponsored enrolees to enter the coupon code on the enrolment form.
There are several reasons why you have not received an email response:
- The most common reason is that the email is caught in your junk mail folder
- You may have forgotten which email address you used as your main email address
- Enrolment is not yet open. We will have received your enrolment, but do not start processing them until after the opening day for enrolment
