Early on in the course we watched a 60 minutes piece on a doctor named Paul Farmer. Farmer was responsible for creating an organization called Partners in Health, which is responsible for providing health care for millions of people in underprivileged countries. He helps train doctors and leads the way for this organization, and does not do it for financial compensation. The emotional intelligence characteristic he displays here is social awareness because he does it solely for the benefit of the people he is helping. Most importantly, this video clip showed me that passion is one of the ultimate tools in becoming an effective leader. If you are working on a subject that you are passionate about, then you will become so involved that being a leader will come naturally.
The five practices of exemplary leadership we learned about this term are modeling the way, enabling others to act, encouraging the heart, challenging the process, and inspiring a shared vision. Our team was effective in all of theses areas, with the strongest being inspiring a shared vision. Our team was in agreement with a lot of things and we really had the same vision about where we wanted the project to go throughout the course of the entire project. We also were successful in enabling others to act, because everyone in the group was good at making sure everyone else got involved and keeping everyone on task.
One way our group could’ve improved in the five practices would be challenging the process. On our final feedback session everyone unanimously agreed that we could’ve done a better job of this. Throughout the course of our project we never really challenged our idea that much and just went along with the first things we came up with. We also did not do enough challenging of each other’s ideas individually. I know when it came to editing the proposal our process got really nitpicky on the phrasing of sentences when we should’ve been more focused on the content of the writing.
Overall our group did a great job of displaying the traits of emotional intelligence, specifically social awareness and relationship management. Everyone showed a lot of empathy when someone had to miss a meeting, people understood that these things were going to happen. We also grew a lot as a team over the past ten weeks. At the beginning everyone was pretty quiet, but over the course of the term we grew as a team an it made communication between everyone a lot easier.