BA-352-LINKUN

Introduction – The importance of BA-352

As an international student from China, I intended to come to the U.S. to experience a higher and better education. After almost four years of college life at Lundquist College of Business, I have learned many critical business concepts and comprehensive knowledge. Within all of the business courses I have taken so far, BA-352, a fundamental course of business leadership and communication, is one that I feel it’s the most important class in LCB, because it covers so many important and practical concepts about how to be a leader and how to effectively communicate to team members, working professionals, and even friends and families. And these skills are going to be very beneficial to me when I am ready to look for an employment after graduation.

My goals and expectations in BA-352

My original goal was to gain some knowledge on how to become an effective team member. As I mentioned in my the first week blog post, once I heard the phrase “You are going to work in a group of 4 to 5 to complete your project,” I immediately feel depressed. It is not that I don’t like to work in a group; I just don’t know how to work in a group (details of story in my first week blog post).

As I was taking the class along the way, I have realized that in order to achieve my big goal, there are many small goals for me to overcome before becoming an effective team member, and that linked to two main topics I learned in the first week of the class: Emotional Intelligence and Five Practices of Exemplary. After the end of the second week, I was required to complete my self-assessment for leadership development plan. One of the areas that I needed to improve was to challenge the process.  

A report for my progress throughout the course

I would have to say that throughout ten weeks of intensive group working experience, I am ready to become an effective team member and even had the will to lead. As I planned,

• I wanted to get a good start by taking a good initiative to encourage everybody to be participative. I have reserved meeting room at least one day in advance for every single meeting we’ve had and I never failed to do that, even during the busiest week where everybody was looking for a room to practice their presentation.
• In addition, since I am an international student, I told myself that I needed to talk more often during the class and the meeting. The sentences that came out of my mouth do not have to be fast, but they must be complete and constructive. In other words, I wanted to have a good and effective communication skill, not just speaking with meaningless words. During the class and meetings, I forced myself to concentrate on the topics and details that the teacher and my team members said   
• Also, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and be ready to live in the learning zone because as Ron said in the class that people who live in their comfort zone would never learn as much as than those people who live in the learning zone. This is one of the most important areas I wanted to improve, that is, challenge the process. For me, it would definitely be easier just to follow along with my team members, because it just makes sense to them if I don’t talk a lot since English is not my first language. However, I forced myself to be the devil’s advocate in the meeting to avoid the group think. I have to admit that this was a bold decision and I could very much likely end up fail to connect with my team members. I will provide more details in the story section.
• Furthermore, as I learned from the class, I realized that the importance of how the elements in emotional intelligence will shape a person to become a good leader. As written in my self-assessment, two of the most important areas that I needed to work on were the self-regulation, and the motivation. So, I have decided that during the conflicting moment at meetings, I must control myself and not reflect my emotions to my team members. Also, since I am older than all of my team members, I feel I should encourage them to perform a better task and give them the momentum.

 Below are some detailed stories to describe how I learned the materials and progressed throughout the class and group meetings.

 First time group meeting

At the end of the second week, I finally got to meet my group member outside of the class. We have contributed our own thoughts and understanding about the class and how we should be prepared for the rest of the term. This was a good start! As I mentioned from my first week post, I hope this team is not going to be any of my other teams that everybody ended up pushing their task further and later. Although I got along well with them, I felt a communication barrier between us because I am an international student and English is not my first language. There must be a different culture context involved so I couldn’t understand what their daily college life would be. So when I got home, I registered Facebook and Twitter to learn something that they all interested such as Football or other college sports; so at the beginning of every meeting later on, I will be able interact them to build a good relationship (they usually talk something about their own life in the first 15 minutes of every meeting). However, I soon realized that everybody was not on the same level of expectation for this class. Some of them wanted to get a good grade by performing a better job but some were ok with an average grade and had no sense of urgency to get into deeper learning mode. I realized that I need to think about how to balance our expectations.

 Preparation for the project

First of all, I can’t believe how easy a team can get into the group think mode. At week 4, we had officially started on our project. During the meeting, everybody was giving their thoughts about the problems that LCB has. Somehow, our ideas were basically the same, that is, students need more practical experiences at LCB! Then I realized that this was too obvious and vague problem that is difficult for us to come up with a solution to solve it. There must be a more specific and smaller section of the problem we can focus on, because we only have limited time of eight weeks. I thought this was a good time for me to act as a devil’s advocate role. I started to throw some of my suggestions about how we should focus on smaller problems and provide more details. For example, I thought we should be targeted to specific level of students at LCB and try to focus on their needs. Also, we could target on different level of alumni members to see if there is a preference that students may like to choose. I once suggested with a younger alumni workshop they are the people who just started their career and may have some valuable recommendation for current students. However, because they were all comfortable with what they agreed before, they did even want to hear my thoughts. One lesson I learned is that I did not show them enough of my confidence at the beginning. I told them my English was a problem and need to be improved; so they tended to have the pre-set mind that my suggestions probably won’t be good because I can’t even speak proper English. I realized that I should have given them enough confidence at the beginning so everybody would have treated me the same as others.      

 Prior to the first presentation

A couple days before our first presentation, I reserved a room for us in the library to discuss our first proposal and presentation. It was a Sunday morning, and I bought coffee and breakfast for everybody. I thought this could be my contribution to show them that I made more effort in the group so they can be motivated to do an efficient work. However, it did not work very well, and we ended up had a three-hour long meeting. For me, I would prefer to do a good preparation before come to the meeting, but for them, they prefer to do their tasks within the group. I was not very happy to see this, but I know this is the time I need to control my emotions and express my angry feeling on my team members. I privately talked to Eric and Kristen, and I found that they are the two who had similar expectation about the class as I did. But none of them wanted to be the bad guy to push too hard on the team. I assume it is just easier to get along well with others and everybody bears the consequence together. During the conversation, I told them that if I stood up and act like the bad guy to tell other members in the team to do a good job, I would want them to support me. They agreed. That’s the moment that I felt the sense of urgency to lead the team. As a result, it worked. The team became more productive and our presentation PPT was well prepared. According to the five practice of exemplary, I needed to model my way as a good leader at that moment, so I practiced my part for the presentation over and over, and I even made more efforts on the design and animation of our PPT slides, because I wanted to show them in action that me as a leader at that moment, I should set up a good model to encourage them to do a better job.

 Feedbacks from the mid-term

Sometimes thinking and worrying too much can be a problem to the team. As I received my feedback from my team members, I realized that they all think that I should worry less and be optimistic. I sincerely accepted their feedback because this is something that I could never discover on my own. Their observation was very subjective and I thanked everybody in the team. Because I don’t have enough confidence among all American students, I tend to worry more often of those “What if” questions. I realize that my problem could cause the team to be de-motivated and load them with too much work to do.     

 Conflict rose after the first proposal

As the term was getting more and more intensive with other class materials, everybody in the team seemed a little bit frustrated about our final proposal. Because we have gathered many valuable feedbacks, it required a much more modification for our first proposal. Within so limited time, we didn’t know how to balance the work load and choose a better alternative. Some of them thought that we should continue to focus on what we had so far and modify a little bit so we can complete our project on time. Others, including me, thought that we should modify our work significantly because what we had so far was too vague and general according to the feedbacks we have received. At this moment, I started to doubt myself that was I thinking too much again? Do we really have the time and ability to do a major modification on our project? Those questions were kept in my mind and fighting with each other for a long time. Finally, I’ve decided to go with the team, since my feedback was not to worry too much and try to let it go sometimes. Although we got a B for the project, I felt that was the best we can achieve as a team, not individually. There are much more I can do better for the team, but I realized that this project meant to be a learning process I felt I learned significantly about how to become an effective member in a team.

 Looking forward in the future         

As I mentioned that there are much more to improve in my future leadership experiences. This class just helped set up a good initiative for me to start to practice my leadership experience. To be honest, I did not learn anything until at the week 6 or 7 of the term, because that’s the time where we had the most conflicts within the team. So there was not much of time for me to practice what I have learned. First of all, one of the obvious problems for me which I did not discover at first was to not think too much. And this was the feedback I received from my teammates. I realize that thinking too much is sort of imprinted in my life and become part of my personal characteristic. I got this bad habit ever since I came to the U.S., thinking too much of how I was not capable to talk to Americans and therefore I need to think more and do more. This will decrease my confidence greatly if I don’t plan to cultivate my behavior. Besides, if I found a job later on after graduation, there are only limited amount of time for me to complete my tasks, I need to logically allocate and balance well within the limited resources I have. Focusing on excellence is always a good thing, but I think this only happens and builds up when I know I have the ability to complete certain task within certain limitation.        

Some extra observations besides the class lecture

Even though we have all the information and techniques to learn how to become a leader in a team, culture diversity sometimes arises within a team that could be a barrier to the team success. Sometimes, I just can’t seem to understand why I often think differently than all of others within my group. For example, I remember at one meeting when we were discussing about how to find a problem by targeting on different level of students at LCB. I immediately thought that we should focus on freshman, because I linked to my personal experience that an opportunity to receive an education is difficult and when they came to college as freshman, they are eager to learn; however, all of my other team members thought that freshman don’t even care about their school life because they have four years to figure out that question, and therefore, we should focus on junior and senior students. I think this is a culture difference between me and all my American teammates. But if I tend to ignore this culture difference and just judge or reject their opinion as wrong, I would miss valuable information from them.      

 Comments for the course

In my opinion, team work is absolutely a vital ability that everybody in LCB needs to have, and BA-352 provides a wonderful opportunity for students to learn how to lead. At the end of the class, one of the most common complains about the BA-352 from students including me was that, there is no leader in our group so we wasted most of our time throughout the term. Of course, in reality, companies will likely not to set up a team without an experienced leader; however, I think that is exactly what Ron’s intention for the class, and we all seemed to misunderstand it. It is a meaningful learning process to become a leader, not to think so much about how we can get an A in this class.