I love working with other people. It is great to get into a new group filled with others who are optimistic and ready to do great things. It is equally rewarding to enter a group with individuals lacking these appealing traits because it gives me the opportunity to develop them.

Group Example: Helping Others

In preparation of our final group presentation and proposal, we were all assigned different parts to focus on in order to distribute the work load. I was able to complete mine relatively quickly.

I noticed that one of the group members had a little bit more work to do than the others. A section that was assigned to them was very important and it had a lot of content to cover. Even though I was completed with my section, I volunteered to help with the particular section. This was very important of me to do because even though my main goal in my Leadership Development Plan was to Enable Other to Act, another one that I really wanted to work on was Model the Way. It was mentioned in my final peer evaluations that “[Stephan] always came to the meetings with his parts done and often volunteered  to help others in the need of assistance”.

I find that helping other people is important because not only does it accomplish short-term objectives, it improves the overall productivity of the group. When one group members sees another group member helping somebody out even though they have all their work done, they will be more inclined to do the same in the future. Without this reminder, some students will simply complete their part and sit back to do nothing. This also improved my emotional intelligence goal of empathy because I was able to observe that someone needed help.

Another source that I used in order to increase my understanding of effective collaboration is the diagram below:

Many of these principles fall under the 5 Practices of Leadership model which is explained here. All of these are good reminders for what to focus on during group meetings and having cognizance of how the meeting is being conducted (is there one person dominating the group, are we being persistent in our efforts, do we have a set strategy, etc).