Collaboration Skills

Introduction

I participated in a course called BA 352: Leadership and Communication during Fall term 2013. The premise of this course was to dynamically teach leadership and communication through a team based class. As a result, I was put into a team during Week 1 of this course and, from that point on, the class was mainly about allowing our team to learn about leadership and communication through the creation of an improvement proposal document and presentation. In order to complete this project, collaboration and teamwork were extremely important. Throughout the term, I was able to learn more about my strengths and weaknesses in relationship to collaboration and I was also able to improve my collaborative efforts within my team. The artifacts listed below highlight these improvements.

Artifacts

At the beginning of this course, I was asked to reflect on my collaborative strengths and weaknesses using Kouzes and Posner’s Leadership Model and the Emotional Intelligence Leadership model. Using this reflection I developed a Leadership Development Plan. This plan is Artifact #1 for demonstrating my improvement in collaboration. In this plan, I stated that my strengths regarding collaboration were encouraging the heart, modeling the way, and controlling my own emotions. I knew that my capabilities in these areas would benefit my team and the project that we were beginning to create.

The Leadership Development Plan also outlined my weaknesses according to the two leadership models listed above. The weaknesses that I identified based on a Self Assessment (Artifact #2) that I took were enabling others to act and being socially aware of other people’s emotions. As a result, I developed several action plans to work on improving these aspects of collaboration as I continued to work on my team project. In these action plans, I committed to making sure that every team member was involved in discussions as well as making sure that I asked clarifying questions about what each team member was feeling during discussions so that frustration and anger were not left to build up in someone and, eventually explode.

The first time that I received solid feedback about my progress in this area of collaboration was in my Midterm Peer Evaluation Report (Artifact #3). According to my teammates, I had done a good job of keeping the group focused and on track, I was friendly and organized, and I was willing to take on extra work so that other people would not have to do it. All of these are great collaboration skills. However, this report also revealed my need for more improvement in my action plan areas. My teammates commented that I would dominate at group meetings, advocate for my ideas too much, and dismiss other group members ideas without sufficient discussion. Based on this feedback, it was clear that I had some more improvement to do over the second half of the term in regards to collaboration.

As a result, I listened to that feedback and began to focus more on my Leadership Development action plans throughout the second half of the term. By the time that we reached Final Peer Evaluation Reports (Artifact #4), I had made some clear improvements in collaboration and my teammates had noticed. In this evaluation, my teammates commented that I had “showed improvement in compromising when the entire group thought of a strategy differently” and that I “gave good positive emotional feedback for interesting directions for brainstorming.” Both of these were aspects of collaboration that I worked on during the second half o the term and, based on the comments that I received during Final Peer Evaluations, my teammates had noticed improvement and so had I.

Conclusion

Collaboration was an extremely important part of my experience in BA 352. By following my Leadership Development action plans and listening to feedback, I was able to improve in several areas of collaboration such as enabling others to act and being socially aware of other people’s emotions. This ultimately benefited my team.

However, there are still some areas of collaboration that I can improve in. One of these areas is making sure that my collaborative efforts are not harmed by the stress of the project. Some of the critiques that I received on my Final Peer Evaluation Report mentioned that I had allowed my stress level to damage my ability to collaborate at times. As a result, I am going to focus on not allowing stress to negatively impact my collaborative efforts in other course projects during my college experience.