As required in BA-352 this term, I completed my leadership development plan at week two, and one of the most important assessments in this plan is to evaluate the level of my emotional intelligence and be able to develop a systematic plan on how to improve my emotional intelligence. According to the reading, emotional intelligence is primarily focusing on the awareness and self and others, and be able to take actions to control self.
Although I feel I have qualities in all four areas of Emotional Intelligence, I believe one of my strengths is Social Awareness. As I mentioned in my leadership development plan, I tend to care others’ feelings and have empathy for them. As I learned throughout the term, team collaboration is strengthened through understanding how team members or coworkers operate. It is very important of being an empathetic leader because others will not listen to what you have to say if you do not work or connect with them. As the term goes, I have tried to keep a good balance in our meetings between getting down to work and just having friendly conversations.
Another strong quality I have is related to Self-awareness. As an international student, I have come to understand the culture diversity, and I will do much more research on how Americans talking every day. I have never bring something to the group without doing research because I don’t know if my lack of awareness would end up with what kind of consequences.
Artifacts: At the week four we had our regular meeting at Lili’s Hall 263 on Thursday. Our meeting usually started with 15 minutes of delightful conversation about each person’s life and stories. I sat back and listened carefully what they were talking and try to follow along with them, because I don’t know which topic was going to offend them.
With all of the five categories of emotional intelligence, I think one of the areas that I needed to improve is self-regulation. Sometimes when we were into a deep conversation and debate, I find myself having hard time control my feelings because I thought their ideas were not acceptable. But, to made it worse, often times I was the only one who did not agree with our team opinion, and four of the others are totally thought it was a good idea.
Artifact: For example, as I mentioned in my final post, at a meeting when we were trying to find a problem that could related to certain level of students at Lundquist College of Business. I suggested that we need to focusing on freshman because they just came to school and they are eager to learn. I kind of throw my personal experience into those students that they must like to study because I like to study and I know how hard to get into a world-class university here from a Chinese student’s view point. However, four of others were all seemed to disagree with my opinion because they thought freshman students at LCB does not care their academic life at all. They have four years to figure out why they go to school and how they are going to learn from school. They obvious have more personal experience than I do. But in this case, we both tried to put ourselves into the situation. What we should have done is to go out and get more survey from more students at LCB to let them speak the truth.
As I was learning a long this term, I have found that self-Regulation or Management is very important aspect for a team work. I understand the importance of self-control because of our audience. I lived in Spencer View Family Housing on Campus, and one day my wife and I were getting into a hearing in our community room because the school constantly using chemical to remove grass, and that will potentially hurt our children who are living around this area. We had a serious debate and I was one of the representatives. I found that I must maintain a strong face for the school representatives because members feed off the vibes from their leaders, and an environment with too many emotions can create disorganization. This can be translated into the business world and maintaing a professional manner. Sustaining a consistent, professional manner can build credibility as a leader in your company, potentially leading to great opportunities. Luckily enough, in our team, none of us “lost our cool” and maintained a positive atmosphere, even while debating. I certainly feel the pressures that everybody had when we were in the debate, but we were all able to hold our feelings and try to do the best we could.
However, according to my feedback from the midterm, I was surprised to learn that I did not do a good job on self-awareness, because there were something apparently I did not aware but they helped me find it. According to my Feedback from the midterm, I was worried too much and sometimes over thinks things that aren’t necessary. I have to admit that I do acted like that I worried a lot. This could also attributed to that my self-regulation was one of my weakest component within the Emotional intelligence.
In no other course have I been able to have such in depth team feedback and it has made a serious impact on my education. In other course, the evaluations have been dull or not helpful, but the fact that in this course we used two class periods to meet with our teams and discuss the evaluations in person completely changed the team dynamic. Although I was fortunate to have a cohesive group, I have heard from other classmates who had a few bumps in the road that the feedback sessions improved their team dynamics. I am good at taking in feedback and processing it because I know that what I think I am doing might not come across how it was intended. It is difficult for me to understand why some don’t like constructive criticism because it isn’t mandatory for you to change who you are, but to make you think about how you might do things.
In the future, I will definitely be evaluating my personal behaviors and constantly receiving feedback from others because I really believe this is a very good way to reflect myself and expose to more problems that I won’t be find out on my own.
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