In order to develop my leadership skills, I set some goals at the beginning of the BA 352 class regarding K&P’s 5 Practices of Leadership and Emotional intelligence. I made a leadership development plan at the beginning of the term highlighting my weaknesses as a leader and a plan to improve them. Under K&P’s 5 Practices of Leadership, I noticed that I am deficient in modeling the way and challenging the process. Specifically, I made it my goal to receive feedback well, build consensus for my team which would make it easier to challenge ideas and the process, and to exemplify my values to my team members. For emotional intelligence, I wanted to focus on self-awareness; I can get frustrated easily in group projects, so I wanted to develop self-awareness on how my actions and attitude affected the team attitude and progress. In order to improve upon some of my underdeveloped leadership skills under modeling the way and challenging the process, the team had feedback meetings after a couple of our regular meetings to discuss our progress, reiterate our goals, and give feedback to one another. Also, I challenged myself to step up and contribute to the team meetings in ideas and questions about others’ ideas. These meetings were successful at allowing for feedback that I specifically knew I needed to work on. Additionally, it added more focus and positivity to the group as we discussed how much we had progressed and learned in the class. Challenging myself to contribute ideas was somewhat successful, I was given feedback that I still needed to contribute more. To work on my goals regarding emotional intelligence and self-awareness, I decided to take time after each meeting to reflect on my attitude and how it affected the group. This self-reflection often occurred in my blog posts. It was successful in helping me curb some negative feelings I had in group meetings, which would bring down the morale of the group; also, my self-reflections enabled me to see frustration within different group members. I could understand their frustrations and help to ease them. My work in self-awareness also strengthened my awareness of others.
The primary aspects that worked for me from my leadership development plan were the self-reflections. I primarily vented my frustrations through my blog posts. One of my posts was one that showed how frustrated I was doing the proposal. These self-reflections allowed me to self-reflect on how my attitude was affecting that of the group as a whole. The main aspect of my leadership development plan that did not work was setting goals to challenge the process better. The goal-setting was too abstract that I would often forget about it. My goal setting did not have the effect I desired; my evaluations consistently said that I could have “contributed ideas more”. I plan to gain more confidence that will allow me to challenge ideas more.
In order to become a more successful leader beyond this class, I need to work on challenging the process further. I plan to work on my balancing inquiry and advocacy by trying to consciously think about inquiring more in my group projects. Before meetings, I will set individual goals for myself to develop my leadership skills. In my finance group this term, I worked on challenging some of the conventions in the team near the end of the term. We ended up being more successful on the projects because I challenged the way group members were looking at some of the problems. Beyond the course, I plan to gain confidence in some of my ideas; part of this confidence stems from knowledge of the material, so I will make sure to gain a thorough understanding of some of the ideas in the group work. Also, I want to work on gaining the confidence to speak up in my groups, and that will come with practice working with groups in later semesters. I also want to continue my team feedback sessions as well as my individual reflections to become even more proficient at accepting feedback.
By working with my team and working on developing myself as a leader, I have learned a few things about leadership that were not emphasized in any of the articles I read. The first thing I learned was that leadership is not just about the individual. The articles emphasized individualistic ways to approach leadership development, but working with my team showed me that sometimes leadership transcends the individual. To be a successful team, you have to have a mixture of different leadership types. The second thing I learned was that sometimes focusing on improving one aspect of emotional intelligence or K&P’s 5 Practices of Leadership helped to improve a different aspect. For example, I learned how to become self-aware, which also allowed me to view other’s frustrations and become aware of others and their attitudes.
Posted in Uncategorized December 10, 2013
I am proposing a professionalism score of 42 for myself.
Punctuality: 9
Participation: 4
Respect for others: 9
Preparation: 10
Initiative and Motivation: 9
I gave myself a score 0f 9 in the area of punctuality. I was consistently on time to both class and my meetings. I made it a goal to model the way by showing how serious I was about meeting on time. I did go to one meeting late, but I notified my team and made up for my tardiness.
For participation, I gave myself a 4. There were opportunities for me to speak and share ideas in class, but I didn’t take that many of them. I should have spoken up more, and thus I graded myself fairly low.
Under respect for others, I scored myself a 10 because I consistently listened to feedback from others regarding memos, team performance, and the resume. Also, I gave my teammates valuable feedback that they could use to improve upon in the future. I held people accountable for side conversations and going off task.
I gave myself a 10 for preparation because I completed every reading and task before class and team meetings. I did not need to be reminded of any assignments by the professor or my classmates.
I scored myself a 9 on initiative and motivation because I took advantage of the majority of opportunities given to me. I committed myself to doing extensive research for the proposal. I also visited the career center to look at my resume and I plan to return to the center to go over my resume and cover letter before applying for the internship. I didn’t take advantage of the journals, thus I graded myself down a bit for that.
Posted in Uncategorized December 9, 2013
This week in BA 352 has been stressful trying to get the proposals finished and working on the presentations. The proposal went smoothly as we just wrote our own parts and then edited them together and edited for concision. The larger issues this week stemmed from working on the presentation. Coordinating everyone’s schedules was difficult to accomplish. People had some issues with showing up and staying focused on the task at hand. I tried to put myself in their shoes, which made it a lot less frustrating to deal with in the end. The part of emotional intelligence I needed to work on was the understanding other’s emotions; I think I accomplished this because I was able to see their frustrations and address them to solve the issues we had.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: ba352fall13, ei, ldp, presenting, writing November 25, 2013
This week’s classes were pretty straightforward with the cover letter workshop and the executive summary lecture. They were primarily centered around writing, and the group meeting was focused on writing the proposal. I have written cover letters on the past; however, I usually focused on one story that showed multiple skills. This way of organizing the letter seems much more clear about the exact skills I want to showcase to the company. I am excited to use another format for a cover letter and see how my business writing improves from that method. Furthermore, I wrote the executive summary for the first draft of the proposal, and I feel fairly confident about writing another summary for our revised proposal.
The group meetings this week were pretty frustrating in my opinion. We struggled to condense the paper and cut out some of the unnecessary wording in the first proposal draft. None of my teammates were listening to my ideas about condensing the situation analysis until they got equally frustrated and tried to find an alternative. I worked on challenging ideas of my group by proposing new ways to fix sentences or paragraphs, as well as the whole situation analysis section.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: 5ps, ba352fall13, ldp, writing November 16, 2013
This week in BA 352 was pretty informative as far as self-evaluation and evaluation from my peers. I learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses as a leader. In my leadership development plan, I outlined my need to challenge ideas because I am a fairly soft-spoken person who doesn’t like to disappoint others. I’m learning that it’s okay to question some ideas in the group as long as I approach my questions with an inquiring mind instead of interrogating. It is something I still need to work on, I learned that in my peer evaluations. The team still has to have a few goals in mind to be more successful in the coming weeks. We need to keep more focus because the group can go off task a lot. I can help with this by taking the conversation back to the proposal or presentation.
In the second class, the prototype we tested on two class members was quite a bit more informative than I ever thought would happen. We wanted to test what students would do in a hypothetical news center if given unlimited options. Both students were not particularly interested in streaming live news unless a new, intriguing story was playing. Both students liked to look up news related their interests, whether it was sports or international current events.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: ba352fall13, ldp November 8, 2013
This week in class was fairly frustrating, but helped me to understand the core issue in the proposal my group is working on. The presentation went alright, I felt there were some areas lacking our presentation just from watching other presentations. Also, the comment about looking at our issue from a curricular standpoint threw me off; I thought that meant we had to choose a class that could incorporate our solution, but after hearing about getting the faculty involved, I better understood that our issue has a basis in the classroom. The second lecture class we had really helped broaden the issue at hand to developing habits. How we develop habits, why we do them are all issues that we need to incorporate into our proposal to understand how to make our solution work.
This week’s meeting did not allow me to develop much regarding my emotional intelligence or my leadership development plan. We basically divided up the writing for the proposal and decided to meet again later in the week to piece our parts together. I learned that I am very proficient at answering group questions and allowing for more answers to be made that are different from my own
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: ba352fall13, ldp, presenting November 1, 2013
This week’s classes were really helpful in developing ideas and carving solutions fit to the ideas in our group, as well as developing ideas that make for good presentations. Having each team member draw out a variety of solutions that we could use to solve our issue was really helpful in getting our solution ideas to flow. We went from a boring tv room (our original solution that we were pretty stuck on) to a wall of interactive televisions displaying current events, stocks, and market conditions for companies. The second day of class helped to solidify some of the important aspects of presenting. I knew about making ideas stick in people’s minds, but the reading showed me why certain ideas or stories stick to people.
I never specified speaking or presenting as something I wanted to improve upon; however, I am looking forward to viewing the presentations next week and learning how to better myself as a presenter. I would like to look at some examples of how people made ideas stick in their presentations and apply that to the final presentation. The group meeting this week was pretty frustrating to me; one of the members that is presenting on Monday was absent, which made it difficult to allow him to contribute. Apart from the absence of the group member, I felt that it was more natural to contribute ideas to our conversations, thus I’m improving on challenging ideas. There were some suggestions that needed fine-tuning, and I tried to help with that as much as possible. I still need to work on mastering my emotional intelligence because I felt like I was getting easily frustrated with some of the suggestions and I had a difficult time motivating the others to work out the ideas to become the best they can be.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: 5ps, ba352fall13, ei, ldp, presenting October 25, 2013
The two lectures this week allowed me to try to think outside the box in terms of some of the issues that LCB students face. I found it to be difficult trying to move away from my viewpoint and what I want from the LCB, and to move into the views of all the students. The interviews that I conducted were helpful in deciding some of the needs that the LCB has the potential to accomplish.
The meeting this week helped show me some of my weaknesses as a leader, but it also helped me work on some of my goals outlined in my leadership development plan. I did some self-reflection after the meeting about my leadership skills and abilities. I was able to speak up about my ideas on our want ad, as well as the expanded POV statement. Some things I found I need to work on is motivating others in my group to challenge ideas. I am highly self-motivated; however, one of my group members finds it difficult to speak up about his ideas. I need to encourage him to speak about what he thinks while we contribute to the group project.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: ba352fall, ei, ldp October 19, 2013
This week, I learned a surprising amount about how I think of solutions to problems and ways to improve that thinking. Additionally, I did achieve some minor accomplishments that I outlined in my leadership development plan in regards to one of the 5 principles of leadership. First, the introduction into design thinking really changed the way I thought about solutions; in the partner activity, I was completely in my head about what my partner wanted in a backpack in terms of design and feature, however, I never completely took account what his exact needs were out of a backpack. My thinking was quite limited, but by the end of the activity, I realized that all I needed was to focus on the primary need and to come up with ideas to only solve that need. I learned a lot about myself and some weaknesses by doing the activity. Now I am going to work on thinking primarily of something people need out of a product and to think outside the box on a solution designed for that need.
In addition to learning about design thinking, I made a few minor changes to the way I approach group work, especially in challenging the process. I spoke up about a couple ideas for improving our team agreements that would make our system as a group work more cohesively. Usually I stay quiet when I think words or decisions could be improved in some form, thus this was a small victory for me. I am working to try to communicate ideas that challenge the way that my group thinks about certain issues, and I think there is still major room for improvement. I had difficulties explaining what I thought would be good, I couldn’t translate my thoughts into actions. For instance, I could not think of a word I wanted to use that would effectively state that we will try to blend our different ideas into one that the group is proud of. This is something I definitely want to work on in the weeks to come. The dynamic of my group is quite different than those of the past, I don’t fear being ridiculed or shot down for my ideas, which will allow me to grow as a leader and communicator.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged: 5ps, ba352fall13, ldp October 11, 2013
This past week in BA 352 has been a slightly stressful one, though I am excited to get into the topics of the course. Coming in to the class, I only knew that there was a group project that took up approximately ten hours a week. I was intimidated by the expected workload; however, now I am excited to learn important skills in leadership and communication. All of the assignments seem important and have implications in the real business world, which I find quite exciting; I’m looking forward to learning how to do a proper resume, cover letter, and business memo. The only aspect of the class I’m having difficulties with is the reading; it seems quite abstract in its ideas, so I am hoping that in-class discussions will help to clarify some of the ideas that I find difficult to grasp reading them individually. So far the course seems challenging, though it should help prepare me to succeed in the business realm.
Posted in Uncategorized October 6, 2013