Describe what you intended to accomplish (your goal), report the progress you made and how you measured it, and the impact. In other words, what were you aiming to accomplish, what actions did you take, how successful were you, and what difference did your actions make?

 Before I was going to take this course, I’ve heard about how difficult and busy this course were. Since this class is about leadership, I set up my goal as learning how to be a leader from this hard and busy course. However, this was just my imagination about this class before I really started taking it. Then, when I read the course materials, I got to know Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Leadership and Emotional Intelligence. So I set up my goal as improving my “Communication” skills and trying my best to “Model the way”. In order to achieve the “Communication” goal, I tried to express more and more opinions on the group meetings steps by steps. As an international student, it was hard for me to catch the pace of my other members. Therefore, I did lot preparations before every meeting so that I could bring up new and useful ideas to talk. When I looked back from my weekly blogs, I found that I was going through 3 different stages on communications:

1. Week 1 to 2, seldom talk on group meeting.
2. Week 3 to 5, start to get engaged with the members and prepare for the presentation.
3. Week 6 to 11, get encouraged from the Midterm evaluation and be confident to express minds.

Those 3 stages show my progresses on “Communication”. Even though I still cannot express my minds 100% as clear as the native speakers, at least I am not afraid of expressing my minds and I am being better! In order to achieve “Model the way” goal, I paid much attention to act professionally and speak logically. I am proud to say I am always punctual and well prepared for every group meetings. And my words and deeds are consistent. From the evaluations, my group members’ comments on me were: very unselfish, always punctual, well prepared and being able to help others. Those comments became the most encouraged power for me to keep modeling the way! After I consisted modeling the way during those 11 weeks, not only did I gain the leadership skills but also I gain the personality of persistence.

What aspects of the process you designed for yourself worked, and what did not? Be concrete. Use detailed examples and stories.

 As one aspect of “Model the way”, I set up one goal as being enthusiasm. This goal did work and guide me be better. Even though I couldn’t catch my group members pace at the beginning, I would not hid my confusions and I was very eager to ask to make sure that I fully understood the topics. For example, when we were writing the first proposal draft, my group members wrote with some euphuistical words that I didn’t understand. Then, I would ask them the meanings or use the dictionary to help me understand. At first, I felt embarrassed and nervous, but I kept my smiles because I didn’t want to bring negative energy to the team. As a feedback, my group members said they loved my smiles and I was the one who always brought positive energy to the team.

However, my process on “Communication” did not work as well as my other goals. Even though I felt like I have improved a lot on communications, my final peer evaluation reports still showed that I should express my thoughts to the team before being asked. Because of the culture difference, most Asian students are reserved and introverted. For example, I would not ask other members “What do think?” because I think they will say their opinions when they are ready to say. In other words, if they are silent, that shows they are still thinking and not ready to share their minds. However, that is just my opinion. For me, I will say my opinion spontaneously when I am confident and ready to say. However, because there are time lags caused by the language barriers, sometimes I express my opinions after I am asked to say. For the future, I think I can say what I have came up with and then add my opinions, in other words, I don’t need to express my mind until I have organized all the sentences.

What do you still need to work on and how will you do that beyond this course?

I think I still need to work on how to get engaged with group discussion. I’ve heard that joining the group discussion is like playing football, which means that if you want to hold the ball and run, you need to be in a good position and chance. For me, I am not good at finding the chance and cut into the conversation. I know the ability of catching the chance to speak is very important in a discussion. Therefore, I planned to go to more networking events and talked to people in a group. Hopefully, I can find the pace the join the discussion properly.

What did you learn about leadership from your team experience in this course that is not captured by the leadership articles and models we discussed in class? In other words, in what ways are these articles and models incomplete, as confirmed by your team experience in this course? (Go beyond the obvious. That “leadership development takes time” is obvious.)

During the whole term, I feel like the most useful thing I have learnt is focusing on developing long-term skills. At the last class, Ron talked about that people usually pay a lot attentions to the urgent issues. However, those urgent issues just pump up, and then, you tried to solve those and then the urgent issues just disappear. In the end, people are just pushed to solve those urgent issues but don’t get much feedbacks. At the contrary, it is the process of building long-term skills that can help people keep learning and teach people being persistent, such as health management. When Ron talked about it, I felt very inspired. Even though many of us do have long-term goal, we usually focus on solving urgent issues and treat those urgent issues much more important than the long-term issues. In the end, we delay the long-term goal or even forget about them. Therefore, no matter how busy we are, we can’t lose our long-term goal. Thanks for Ron, those words I took from this course will be useful for the rest of my life.

I graded myself 45 points out of 50 points for my professionalism grade. I got those points by showing early for every meeting and most classes, sometimes being active in class, always being respectful to others, helping others often, always staying focused, never taking part in sidebar conversations or distracting behavior, always being prepared and taking advantage of every opportunity to learn. From the peer evaluation feedbacks, my group members thought that I was the most punctual person in the team and I was always prepared before every meeting, such as I would collect topic related articles, print out the proposal guidelines, and help other members print out proposal or presentation documents. Therefore, I am proud to say that I am doing well at punctuality, preparation, initiative and motivation.

However, sometimes I was late for class, so I deduct 1 point from punctuality. In addition, my team members said that I am the one who brings positive energy and calming effect on the group, and always stay on topic. As a personal action, I usually bring Asian snacks to share on meetings and I am so happy my team members love it! (Bring snacks doesn’t earn points for me, but I just want to say snacks do help us be happy! Yel!) At last, I deduct 4 points from participation because I am not very active in class. I guess I spoke up for 6 times during the whole term. So I do need to be more active in class participation.

This is really a big week for our Majestic Mallard Team. From monday, we kept meeting almost everyday. And I found that I have learned a lot about the team work experiences. Our team is great and everyone is nice. However, Sometimes, we just stayed in the room staring at the computer screen without the movement of brain. I though the most important reason was  that people were exhausted. I couldn’t forget we met for 8 hours on sunday night! At first, we were very motivated. But after 4 hours, almost everyone’s brain were dead until Cecilia, who was not in the meeting before, came back with fresh view and saved the team. From that, I realized that as a leader, even though the task is very pushed, the members still need time to recovery. Keep focusing for a long time may not bring a effective work.

In the meanwhile, we had Jessica coming taught us how to write cover letters. I never write cover letter before and what she said is very helpful. Stories are a significant selling point and a nice cover letter will help us a lot in the future job searching time.  At last, I felt a lot more confident at writing proposals. I still remembers the first time when I were writing the proposal draft, and I feared to express my opinions. However, I wrote the conclusion part of our final proposal and every member said the conclusion part  is very solid and logical! I really gain a lot confidences from this experience of writing proposal. Next week will also be a big week cause the final presentation is coming! I will be well-prepared for the presentation and  develop my leadership ability through it!

This week we handed in our proposal first draft. Even though we haven’t received the feedback from Ron, I think we did well on our rough draft. However, I know that there is a long way to go. Therefore, we keep meeting this friday though there isn’t tight load due this week. During the meeting on Friday, we fixed our Team agreement according to the evaluations from Monday class. Still, we are looking forward to receiving feedbacks from Ron so that we can improve our proposal. In addition, the evaluation we did in Monday’s class was very helpful for us because everyone started thinking about their role and contributions in the team.

I really want to talk about the evaluation, which is so much helpful for the team. Last week, I were thinking that the evaluation was so difficult to write and might brought bad influence to the team. However, when I got the feedbacks in the class, everyone found this evaluation improve the work of the team a lot. For me, my group members said that I am doing a great job on the teamwork, especially for being well-prepared before the meeting and bringing new and thoughtful ideas to the team. Also they gave me a very high score on the evaluation sheet, which made me feel very moved and encouraged. Well, thanks for the evaluation, and I become more confident in the teamwork!

In addition, I find I improved a lot on writing from doing the proposal work. And I believe I can do better in the following days. For the next week’s goal, I hope I can do better on public speaking as a preparation for the final presentation.

This has been a big time-consuming week for our Majestic Mallard group. On monday we did our presentation and on Thursday and Friday we meet together to work on our First draft. At first, I was the one prepared for the Monday presentation. However, since i removed out my wisdom tooth last Friday and I was having a very bad time until Monday, my group member said that they would help me out. So, one of my group member took my part of the presentation, which made me feel so touching! Overall, we really did a great job on monday! In addition, I found that after the presentation, our minds became more clear and we made a further step to our proposal.

For the workload, our team has been very balance in terms of it. I am not the role of the main leader, but I have contributed to team well. Usually, I will bring up me ideas and suggestions to the team. I am not very effective at talking at the meeting in the class time. However, I will be well-prepared before every outside meetings. For example, before every meeting, I will do a lot of searching works or interviews. Then, I will organize the information I have gotten and be prepared to share my information to the group. I am very appreciate that everyone in my group is trying to contribute themselves to the group. So far, every meeting goes very effective. Every meeting lasts not a very long time but we finish the meeting with sufficient and wonderful works. From the group, I really learn a lot about teamwork. I learn how to separate the different roles of a team, how to run a group meeting effectively and how to listen to other people’s opinions properly. Again, even though I am not the leader in my group, I gain a lot useful experience on leadership. In regard to my leadership development plan, I find that I feel more comfortable to share my opinion among all my classmates. That is definitely a big progress of me. For the following weeks, I will practice myself more on public speaking areas.

This week we started organizing and fixing our ideas. I remembered during the first class, Ron asked us to brainstorm the questions of our proposal and then asked “How might we…”. That was a really interesting way to help us develop the solutions of the questions. We first came out the requirements that were necessary to our proposal and then asked “How might we…” to those questions. And then the results turned out to be incredible! Everyone found that their minds were expanded by that kind of HMW questions.

During the second class, Ron talked about the presentation skills, which was really useful and interesting. At the beginning of the class, we watched two TED programs. The first one was really hush and made people exhausted. However, everyone was more interested in the second one. The reason might be that the second presenter explained the information with simple words at a slow speaking speed.  As for our group presentation, I am one of the presenter. Since I included developing the public speaking skills in my leadership development plan, I decided to challenge myself in the presentation. At first, I was worried about whether I could explain our proposal clearly. However, after I watched the second TED, I did not think it was a matter for me to explain the proposal. Instead, it would be a good thing if I could explain it by using the simple words. Now I am looking forward to the presentation.

Overall, I found a great way to develop a creativity thought by asking the “How might we…” questions. Then, I know that a good presentation does not mean too much information and lots of complicated vocabularies, instead, the interesting story and simple words could built a great presentation. As for my goal of next week, I hope I can do a great job on the presentation and keep communicating with my group members.

This week I learned a lot about how to develop the need statements. During the classes, we continue to brainstorm the needs that are required for the students. However, the need statements we wrote were actually the solutions to the problems. Then, we started not thinking about the solutions and just focusing on the actual needs. Our topic is about the international enrichment and I am the only international student in my group. Therefore, my group members hoped the I could give as much ideas as I can to this topic. However, sometimes it was difficult to organize my thoughts because I had a lot of thoughts in my mind. Then I had no clue about where to begin. So I think that I had always been overthinking and not been able to organize my thoughts are my biggest problem. Fortunately,  my group members really helped me a lot on that. They tried to help me organize the ideas and then develop the ideas.

For my group, we decide to meet every friday at EMU and we are really effective. Before the meeting, everyone is well prepared and focused. From this week, I find that I still need more efforts to express myself clearly. Therefore, my goal for the next week is to organize my thoughts before I am ready to express it. I will update my progress in next weekly blog post.