At the beginning of the term, I set up two goals in the LDP page to develop my leadership skills through this class. The first goal is focus on one of Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Leadership: “Challenge the Process”. It means that I need to take a further step to challenge myself and others to challenge the new thing instead of just maintain the status quo. The other goal is one area of Emotional Intelligence: “Relationship Management”. It means that I have to be a communicative person while managing relationships of the team.
For accomplishing my goal regards “Challenge the Process”, I tried my best to do certain actions that I proposed at the beginning of the term. First, I started from the easy-taking action, which is to do something in a different way in my life. For example, when I went to the restaurant or cafe, I ordered different menu even though usually I tend to order the same menu. The purpose of this action is to make myself have a habit to challenge the new thing so that this habit can be brought to the class exercise as well. Bringing this new habit to the team discussion, I kept in my mind to ask critical questions to other team members, and encouraged team to learn from mistakes. For instance, our group was mistakenly focusing on people’s “awareness” rather than their “behavior” until first half of the class. After the practice presentation, we noticed that we were doing in the wrong way, and it was the time to change to the right direction. At that time, I kept asking them “is that the way to change students’ behaviors?” or “isn’t it more related to their awareness?” to make sure our team is on the right track during the discussion. From this experience, we learned from mistakes and learned how to change our direction to the right way.
To accomplish my goal regards”Relationship Management”, I tried to being more vocal at first. First I went to the “Coffee Hour” most every weeks to practice my communication skill. I made new friends there and communicated with them to practice sharing my ideas. However, when it comes to the team discussion, it was a little bit harder than I expected. Since there are 6 people including me in the team, sometimes I missed chance to speak out during the discussion since each of them spoke continuously one after another. On the first peer evaluation report, I got a feedback from everyone in the team that they suggest me to speak out more to share my ideas. So, since the midterm feedback, I tried to speak up more and gave them my unique ideas. I changed my behavior to raise my hand when I want to say something after the midterm feedback so that I have more chance to share my ideas during the discussion. Changing this behavior, I felt more comfortable to speak out in my team compared to before. And I became a person who can be critical to disagree with some opinion when I have different thoughts, instead of just agreeing with them.
The process that I worked for accomplishing my goals bring a good habit to me. I want to keep continuing this behavior in the future. In addition, I still need to work on practicing being a leader. Since one of my teammates gave me a feedback said “take more steps to become a leader” on the final peer evaluation report, I want to act as a leader to direct others in a team. In order to accomplish this goal, I need to take initiative to do something in my life. For example, when I talk with someone in the Coffee Hour (I will keep going this event to practice my communication skill), I will lead the conversation, such as providing a conversation topic from me.
I learned a lot from this class, not only taking process to develop my leadership plan. I learned that while I needed to work on my plan for accomplishing my goals, I also need to take care of others, and most of times there were many good behaviors that I can learn from them. Everyone has different outstanding characters. Some people have a skill to lead the team, some are good at taking care of others, some are good at sharing ideas, and some are good at organizing. I believe that these abilities are all needed to be a leader. It was a great experience to be a team with these people and learn from them, and I hope this experience will help me when I will deal with the real issues in the group in the future.
