I give myself 44 points out of 50.

For the puntcuality part I give myself the maximum 10 points because I was never late for the classes, group meetings, or any other meetings with the tutors and LCB staff.

I give myself 6 points for the participation. I always participated actively when we had class activities, for example when we had to build a high “building” with spaghettis, or when we had to create a backpack. However, I do not think that I gave enough value to the class discussions. Maybe it is because my first language is not English.

I give myself 10 points for the respect for others part. Respect is one of the most important things in my life, it would be a shame for me if someone told me that I am not respectful. One of my teammates comment at the end of the term was: “Finally, Daniel enabled others to act. He demonstrated this by supporting the ideas of the team and by being respectful of others.

I give myself 9 points for the preparation part. I always read all the articles that were assigned, I submitted the assignments correctly and always on time. The reason why I give myself 9 points is because I missed a few group meetings due my athletics (tennis) obligation. It affected my next meetings because I was not always sure what my teammates talked about when I was missing and what I should do for the next meeting.

Finally, I give myself 9 points for the initiative and motivation part. I really wanted to get better during this class and I did everything I could to succeed. I took advantage of most of the opportunities that the class, or the LCB offered to me.

My goal in this class was to improve my leadership skills. Reading about the five practices of leadership, I realized that I am lacking of some of the skills a good leader has to have. One of my biggest goals was to enable others to act because I though this was maybe my weakest part. I am very motivated and I do everything I can to succeed, but it is very hard for me to motivate other people. One time in our group project some of the members became uncertain about the success of our project and wanted to stop working on it. I had sort of a motivational speech; I tried to convince them that our project is good and that we have to keep working on it if we want to succeed. I think I did a pretty good job motivating them because we decided to keep working on the project, which turned out to be pretty good. I also asked for feedback from my teammates almost every week regarding my leadership development, and at the end of the term they said that I improved a lot in the enabling other to act part.
I know that I can still improve a lot regarding to my leadership skills. I am trying to keep working on how to enable other people to act. I am on the tennis team and I am one the oldest guy on the team and I know that I can help my team a lot if I step up and take some leadership roles. I can show them the way, how to act on the tennis court and how to compete for the University of Oregon. This is a lucky situation for me because I will have a lot of chances to improve my leadership skills on the tennis team.
The most important thing that I learned regarding leadership skills during this term is that a leader is not someone who just tells other people what to do. A leader is someone who takes responsibility for the success of the project his or her group is working on. A leader is someone who is unselfish and always puts the team’s interest before his own interest. Also, the leader has to be the one who works the most because that is the only way others will accept him as a leader. If I want to be a good leader I have to be the first who gets to the meetings and the one who puts the most effort in the project. This is something that I did not think before, but after being in this environment I am convinced that these are the most important features a leader has to have in order for him to be successful.

We spent this whole week coming up with a good need statement. Fist, I thought that it was going to be an easy task, but I had to realize quickly that it is actually pretty hard. We are all on the same track it is just hard to come up with something unique and something that actually would make the LCB a better place.
I interviewed five people this week about our topic and I found it really interesting. First of all, I thought I was not a very good interviewer because people were confused about what I am asking and why I am asking. It might be because the questions were not that great, or I just need to improve my communication skills. If I would like to become a leader one day I have to be good at asking questions and interviewing people. As an international students I know how important it is to be able to understand everything in classes and be able to communicate with other people, but now that I am a member of the Business school I realized that I have to improve so much in business writing and “business speaking”. It is a new level of the English language for me. I would like to improve it with reading a lot of business related articles, and speak more about business related news with friends. I also like to speak up more in class, which I think would be beneficial.

In class:
This week we spent most of our time with learning how design thinking works. I realized that my creativity is not so great, so this is one skill I need to improve for the rest of the term. This class will be a great opportunity to do so as we are doing many creative stuff like coming up with new ideas. I am glad that I got a sense through exercises how creative thinking looks like, and how I can improve it. I did not understand for the first time why we were creating a backpack for our classmates, but I know now that it was something deeper we had to do, think in a different way, this is what this whole class is about. Leaders think in a different way.
Team meeting:
I also had my first meeting with the team and I think it went really well. We all agreed on the what are goals are and that we can only achieve if we work hard as a group. I learned that I have to think about this class “as a group”. I try to be someone who brings joy to the group because I think without having some kind of fun is relevant because then everybody will be happy to work hard. Also, in the first meeting, besides doing our team agreements I tried to get to know the people who I am working with this term. My experience is that if I know someone better in a group that is going to make our job way easier. We started to come up with ideas and I think we found something that is interesting for all of us.
I cannot wait to actually get started and work on our project. It’s fun!

This class seems like a very useful class to me. Leadership is one skill that people have to have in order for them to be successful, especially in the business world. The first week I already learned that leadership is not only about myself, but more about how to act with other people. I think that leadership cannot be learned from textbooks, it takes a lot of practice to get good at it. Although, I believe that the readings will give us good basics that will help us in the future. I am excited about the group project because I like working on a team and I also think that I have to improve my speaking skills and the presentation is a great way to develop it. This class requires a lot of work, but I hope I will get a lot out of it.