What I Have Learned About Leadership

The team leader’s ability to manage and improve team performance will be limited by his or her own authority and ability to influence others. There may be restrictions in terms of organisational policy; there may be financial, resource, or time constraints, or team members themselves may be reluctant to participate and to accept change.

Leadership is summarized as ‘the process in which an individual impacts a variety of individuals to attain a common goal’. The goal is attained by mutual collaboration and cohesive behavior. A leader infuses a sense of positivity and manages others to reach a specified goal. Leadership has had a very profound influence throughout my life by affecting my family, friends, teammates, and the overall decisions that I have made. By using my personal experiences with leadership, I have learned how to use these skills not only on the field, but throughout my everyday actions.

Another team experience came during my first year of undergraduate studies. In this experience, I had the opportunity to work for Texas Tech under one of my professors. The task that I was assigned with was to help with the transition of one online class system to another. Overall, there was a lot of work that had to be done in order to meet the specified deadlines. Personally, I was put in charge of creating two classes in the new format of Blackboard that the university was planning to switch to. With all of the work that had to be done for each class, the professor made specific students in charge of certain classes and then gave each person in charge a team of other students to help the leader with the class. As a team leader, I was responsible for delegating certain objectives out to the rest of the team, while also performing my own tasks. Each task had a concrete deadline to meet and it was crucial that I meet all set deadlines if I expected the rest of my team to meet their deadlines. This helped to hold everyone accountable because if one member of the team slacked, then it gave a bad look to the team as a whole. Furthermore, we had a peer review system put in place

Our team did not have a major problem during the first week of the challenge, everyone in the team got along and the work schedule was light. Problems started to arise during the second week of the challenge, we had more work and our team had to co-ordinate with each other more. The team began to disagree on who should be doing what role, how to approach the tasks and progress was not being communicated well. Adair (2002) suggests that there are four reason people are chosen as leader, one of which is the authority of knowledge. I was the designer and main programmer for the app so team members would come to me for help and advice on what to do for their task. This is the reason I think why I was chosen to

I begin to divert the group off task by my obnoxious loud singing, asking irrelevant questions, and interrupting the members when they are trying to finish their statement. For example, when Damien, the Gatekeeper would make a relevant statement towards our goal about why people choose not to stay at CSU. I would interrupt and announce my opinions about Georgia State, such as I love the parties there, and they are a livelier college. As I continue to talk about my past experience parties at GSU. I notice that everyone in the group begins to agree with my statement, and engage by adding in their own experiences about GSU parties thus, getting them off tract of their initial goal. However, this disruption did not last long, Damien uses a promotive communication approach by keeping the group on track and moving forward in completing our goal. Damien would recall our attention back to the four functions, and get everyone involved and contributing. An example of this is when Damien frequently ask Austin questions that help contribute towards our group session, even though Austin’s role in the group was to be isolated. Another factor that made our group successful in decision making is, Josh. Josh is the information seeker and always seemed to get the group back on tract, specially whenever I interrupted or when the group disagreed in a conflict matter. Josh would use the counteractive approach to get things settled down and back to normal. For example, he would say, “ok guys let’s get back to the group work, and we can talk about that later”. In my opinion if it was not for his leadership, our group would have a tougher time staying focus on our main

A project that I have managed was a senior capstone project which involved extensively researching a psychologist and present a complete presentation to the psychology department heads at Virginia Commonwealth University. As the project manager on the senior capstone project I encountered several difficulties and problems that required an innovated approach to team management. My group included of a total of four group members, these group members assumed as project led I would complete our group project without any help. I used my experience that I gained from working at PepsiCo to motivate my team members into all of us working together. I organized a group meeting to get to know each other by leading a communication exercise among the group

Fielder’s contingency model explores the group dynamic between a leader and the other team members. He explains how an effective group dynamic is reflected when a leader is able to successfully determine what each team member is going to do (Fielder, 1981 and Forsyth, 2006). I believe that I was able to carry out this role effectively as tasks were given according to the strengths that an another team member had. Inclusive of what Fielder had stated, I believe that I was able to act upon the role and motivate my team members when we were faced with challenges. For instance, one challenge that we were faced with was the lack of support each team member gave one another. Although every member was given a task to complete, some members did not carry out their task and as being one of the leaders and following the coaching style, I had taken it as my responsibility to encourage them completing the task. However, after a while, I had noticed that the work was not being done and so I had taken over their roles on top of mine as I knew that their lack of effort would affect my

In 2016, my pathfinder group went on a camping trip. It was my first year as a camp counselor and I worried about my performance as a leader. As the time approached for me to take on my roll,the directors and many of my friends, who were also counselors, comforted me and informed me on the children's schedule. After a couple hours of trying to run everything myself , I was told that all leaders were at the event and were willing to help me lift the load off my shoulders. From that point on, I realized how to be a team player and that taking on every task was inefficient. Of course the habit of being a control freak takes time to overcome and a little bit of stress takes over my mind now and again when things fail to be finished, however,

I currently lead the Chapel team of NewSpring Leadership College. Chapel is an environment for students by students. It exists to refresh and refocus students through the worship of God and the word of God. I lead a team of 7 NSLC students that all have a role related to the area of ministry they see themselves working in one day. Out team meets every sunday to plan an event that happens the first Wednesday of each month. In my role, I win at casting vision and helping people see what I see. I feel like every event that we’ve put on, I can see before it happens. Once I feel like I have some direction, I present things to the team, and all their Ideas and add-ons usually lead

Before this class, I had a very primitive and vague definition of leadership. Not only did I define it as per my views and ideologies, but I also said that each individual has their own definition of leadership. My initial belief was that leadership does not have a clear cut definition, but there were well defined leadership traits which made an individual. I also initially believed that personal traits did not translate into leadership traits with no strong correlation. After going through the various modules this class offered, it is safe to say that I have significantly redefined leadership and underwent a strong personal assessment. This paper talks what I took back from each of the class activities, assignments and how my self-assessment compares to the perception of others.

I chose to lead my team with fairness. I allowed them to pick the tasks they prefer to work on instead of allocating it directly for them as I do not want to force unwanted tasks on them. I placed myself in the position of a member instead of a leader and tried to understand their situation when the tasks were submitted late. I also informed the team to approach me or message me when they need to clarify or have any doubts for their parts. I had also provided an update report after each submission to keep them informed of the project progress.

It is hard to quantify what I have learned in the semester of Leadership because the courses focus was not about memorizing data, but rather learning about having the will to lead and finding the courage to make it happen. A majority of the information I learned from this course came from learning about myself. Through readings, course activities, and various projects, I learned what makes a great leader, but more importantly what traits I possess that will make me a great leader. In order to be a great leader, one must have an understanding of what leadership is. Leadership is a social influence (Stogdill, p. 25). It means leaving a mark. It is initiating and guiding, and the result is change. Leading is the result of your passion coming to life.

From the outset I operated in a leadership role, coordinating and administering the group’s efforts. I accepted this responsibility as others were intimidated by the perceived burden of leadership I consulted with the group and developed a project timeline that best fit everyone’s availability, project constraints and unit objectives. I consolidated and communicated progress to the course supervisor, and ensured they remained informed during the project. I facilitated and managed clear communication within the group and this resulted in an initially effective working relationship with the other group members. I did this by using culturally-sensitive communications practices and by ensuring every team member was able to provide input, such as establishing a WhatsApp group. When necessary, I stepped in and assisted team members in their tasks, but as much as possible I encouraged team members to take ownership of the project

As we begin to form our self-managed work teams this week for the final report and presentation due at the end of session, I begin to reflect on the situations where I have had to be part of a group. Accordingly, past experiences have led me to form a generally negative viewpoint with regards teamwork in both the education and workplace setting. In most situations, group work is facilitated by a single leader responsible for ensuring that all members complete their work to the required standard. Nevertheless, this has lead to situations where team members often become unproductive or dysfunctional. For one thing, conflict – whether it be task or relational – arises between team members and leaders when they begin to feel that they are subject to the leader’s authoritarian behaviour or scrutiny. For another, the leaders responsible for the management of the group begin to feel underappreciated or dissatisfied with the levels of task productivity generated by group members. In stating this, I have experienced both sides of single leadership team management – with mostly disastrous results – where negative team performance ultimately reflected on assessment grades.

As a whole, I believe our group worked well together. “This is a very functional group, I like it,” in Nandin-Erdene’s words. During the discussions, all of the members of our group fully contributed and shared their point of views. During the research, we were given the assignment of finding possible solutions to our problem, which was economic crisis in Mongolia. My teammates at the time was distracted with the school’s annual Talent Show, and didn’t state new solutions besides the ones we already discussed. I knew something like this would happen, so I took careful planning in advance. I offered possible solutions that would be efficient, and in the end, we finalized our solutions.