Monthly Archives: November 2013

The Final Proposal

I arrived from a Leadership and Creativity symposium at the Ohio State University Sunday afternoon and met with my team upon my arrival. I left to the conference Wednesday night after meeting with my team and figuring out some logistics about our proposal and therefore was unable to meet with my team until Sunday afternoon. Despite being gone for four days and feeling like I was unable to help my group, I made up for the time I was gone by putting in work Sunday night with my team. During the time I met with my team I noticed my strengths were being reflected.

The team was having a hard time concentrating and being motivated to complete the proposal and despite being tired from my flight I was really motivated to get it done. I was able to spread my motivation amongst my teammates which resulted in successfully completing our proposal. My two strengths I ranked in the five practices of leadership, enabling others to act and encouraging the heart, were definitely portrayed that Sunday night.

Defeating Frustration

This week my team and I met on Monday right after class to look over the feedback we received from the professor.  We concluded that we needed to gather further information to support our claim. A couple weeks prior I had attended a networking event that was similar to what we were proposing. It was the first time this event was held by both the Career Center and LCB Career Services. I proposed to meet with the people who ran the event to get further information relevant to our proposal. We set up an appointment the following day and interviewed the coordinator of the event. She was able to provide us with useful information that would help us support the claim my team and I make in our proposal.

The following day the entire team met and we worked on how to incorporate the information we gathered into our proposal. While doing this a bit of frustration started to rise amongst the team and I quickly mentioned what I observed and that allowed for everyone to check themselves and helped settle down the frustration.  I was also able to implement one of my action plan goals shortly afterwards.  While revising our proposal the team was starting to doubt the entire proposal and wanted to take a new direction. I reminded them we all had agreed upon a team vision “to successfully complete our proposal” and changing the direction of our proposal would not allow us to successfully complete it. We decided to stay with what we had initially and worked on improving it based on the professor’s feedback.

I left that night to a conference I am attending this week and planned to meet with them on Sunday when I would be back. I was glad I could provide a way for the team to gather information that would benefit our proposal and clarify the direction the team was going before my departure.

LDP Actions Taking Place

This week I received team feedback and face-to-face feedback from my team members. I was humbled, please, and relieved from the feedback I received. I noticed my team members feedback correlated with my strengths and weaknesses of the five practices of leadership. My areas of improvement also went in hand with my developing plan and their feedback gave me tangible ideas to implement my developing plan actions.

Based on the feedback I received I am good at keeping the team focused on tasks, monitoring the group work,  and making sure it is relevant to the assignments. This shows I have been able to execute my action plans from my Leadership Development Plan. One of my action plans was “Speak up when the team is swerving away from the team vision.” I have been able to bring focus to the team preventing the team from going on tangents.

I did notice my teammates commented on how I voice my opinion (“Voice my opinion about team progress” one of my Leadership Developments plan actions) but I do not stick with it. They suggested I follow through with my opinion and not let it get shut down. I plan to implement this onto my Leadership Development Plan to make it more successful.

As I continue to work together with my team, I hope to gain further suggestions on how I can overcome my weaknesses and help others overcome theirs.

Team Progress and My Contribution

The team progress has been interesting to observe and be a part of. The team started off with addressing a need for international student inclusion and with our research and surveys it shifted to a need for networking amongst the LCB students and staff. Just like the ladder of inference states, we had a belief but then we collected data and by analyzing the data we found a new belief in which we have decided to take action upon.

Thus far the team has collaborated well together. As far as my collaboration goes, I have been facilitating meetings when the team leader is not able to meet with the rest of us due to schedule conflicts. I am inclusive of all members by suggesting ways to collaborate that require the input of everyone. Like with our first proposal draft, instead of assigning everyone a section I suggested we all start off with a section, take a few minutes to write down ideas and content and then rotate the sections. This way everyone had the opportunity to look over every section of the proposal add suggestions, fix errors and provide input. This worked out very smoothly for all of us. It also allowed for everyone to be on the same page as far as the details of our solution and our overall proposal.

I hope to continue bringing ideas of ways the team can work together and make sure no one is left behind. No wonder encouraging the heart was my number one rank in the 5 practices, I like to recognize everyone’s contribution no matter how big or small it is.