This term, I created a leadership development plan that was intended to help me grow in two main areas. The first area was one of Kouzes and Posner’s Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership and that practice was enabling others to act. Naturally, I work best individually and when I get into teams I often bring this tendency with me. As a result, I end up doing most of the team work which creates more stress for me and less opportunities for growth and development for the other people in my team. This also makes it more difficult for my team to achieve synergy and to create projects that exceed my own abilities. In order to address this area of growth, I proposed that I would make sure that every person in my team had a voice by asking them questions and drawing them into the conversation. I also stated that I would refrain from taking over the project by making sure that the members of my team were responsible for parts of the project that matched their interests and abilities.
The other growth area that my leadership development plan focused on was the social awareness aspect of emotional intelligence. I am not always able to read the emotions of other people well. In team situations, this can be dangerous because if I do not see an emotion or I misread an emotion, it can cause misunderstandings and frustration within our team. This is another reason why the team might not achieve synergy. As a result, I proposed that I work on my social awareness by making sure that there was room in our discussions for people to express their emotions about different ideas and by asking questions about these emotions to make sure that I was reading them right. This was intended to prevent any misunderstandings or frustration from building up within our team and exploding later on.
Throughout this term, I was moderately successful at achieving both of these goals. First, my success at enabling others to act was mainly demonstrated in team discussions and in a few class activities. During the first half of the term, I focused more on getting others to participate in our team discussion by asking questions and making sure that everyone was engaged and in agreement with the ideas that were being presented and approved. This required me to be more of a “thinker” rather than a “doer” because my natural inclination would be to take the first viable idea that was presented to the team and immediately move into logistics of how to transform that idea into our project. As a “thinker”, though, I had to make sure that other ideas were being discussed so that the best possible option would be chosen. This required me to enable other to act by making sure that they were participating in the discussion by sharing their diverse thoughts and ideas.
Although I was successful in this aspect of enabling other to act, my midterm and final peer feedback revealed that I was not as successful in holding back my own opinions and ideas during team discussions. The main feedback that I received from my midterm peer evaluations was to not share my own ideas as frequently in the discussion because they would overwhelm the rest of the group. However, as we experienced more and more stress related to our final project, it was more difficult for me to do this because, as a doer, I would have to push my team into making decisions so that we could finish the different parts of our project on time. This meant that I became more involved in the conversation and not less which is why I was not as successful in this aspect as I was in the other one.
I also achieved a moderate level of success in increasing my social awareness of my team member’s emotions. During the first half of the term, I was especially conscious of this because our group was still getting to know each other and learning how to interact with one another. As a result, there were a few times that I pulled a team member aside after a meeting to clarify what emotions they had been feeling during the discussion. I would also apologize if I had contributed to any negative emotions that they had felt. At the midterm peer evaluation, I received mostly positive feedback from my team about my social awareness. The only constructive feedback that I received had to do with making sure that my “doer” tendencies didn’t lead to me quickly rejecting the ideas of different team members and, in the process, hurting their feelings. Working on this aspect of social awareness was my midterm goal. However, like my goal of enabling others to act, I allowed the stress of the final project to cause me to not be as successful during the second half of the term. I became too focused on finishing the project on time that I would sometimes frustrate or hurt other people in my group unintentionally. As a result, I was only moderately successful at achieving my goal of becoming more aware of my team member’s emotions.
The impact that my goals and my ability to achieve them had on my team was more significant during the first half of the term . First, the processes that I had developed to meet my goals were mostly focused on gaining significant team interaction through the sharing of ideas. During the first half of the term when most of our project work was about generating and discussing ideas, these goals had a huge impact and I was able to help facilitate great group discussions. However, during the second part of the term when we needed to be more action oriented, the processes that I had designed to meet my goals were not as effective. In order to move the team forward so that we could get our presentation done on time, I had to act in ways that did not support my leadership development goals. If I were to design the processes to achieve these goals again, I would design a thought oriented goal and an action oriented goal for each aspect of my leadership development plan so that I could work toward achieving that plan regardless of the stage that the proposal was in.
I still need to work on being aware of how my ideas and comments affect others and knowing when to hold those ideas and comments back. This is a combination of my leadership development points from this term of enabling others to act and increasing my social awareness. I am going to continue to work on this by first focusing on these ideas in teams where there are not hard deadlines and other high stress activities so that I can really learn these skills. Then I will start focusing on these goals in groups that are more stressful to see if what I have learned will stick in the face of more challenging circumstances. This process might happen a few times before I am able to say that I have really experienced success in this area but the benefits of diverse and inclusive team discussions are so valuable that I need to make sure I am doing everything possible to make it happen.
Finally, through my team experiences, I learned one main thing about leadership that was missing from the leadership models and articles that we discussed in class. I learned that merely having a diverse team is not enough to achieve team synergy. At the beginning of the class we talked about how gaining team synergy would help us create a better project than any one member of the team could create on their own. However, most of the articles that we read discussed how team synergy was a result of diverse teams and not much more detail was given. My team was definitely diverse, but we quickly realized that this alone was not enough to help us achieve synergy. Instead, the times that we experienced synergy were when everyone had a clear idea of what our vision and purpose as a team were and knew what each person’s role was in developing that vision and purpose into an improvement proposal for LCB. Unfortunately, this did not happen as often as I wish it had because it was difficult to get the diverse personalities in our group to agree on a single vision and purpose. Therefore, out of this experience I learned that it is more important to have everyone on your team working towards a single vision rather than merely have a diverse team that is not able to agree on a vision.
My experience in this class has been interesting. Although my team was not as great as I hoped it would be, I feel like I discovered quite a bit about my own leadership abilities and challenges. As I leave this class, I hope to take that knowledge and continue to explore and develop my leadership potential in other aspects of my life.