Happy Holidays

Happy Holiday/holiweek (grand Prix) everyone!  Hope everyone is enjoying the day and getting plenty of rest!

Tricia Coonan Rocks Yo

Disclaimer.........

Honestly, the one thing I hate more than anything else in school is group work. So often I get no direct benefits out of the work and half of the group meetings are completely unsuccessful and no common goal is accomplished.  People show up with little knowledge on the subject, and then to try to construct a paper or powerpoint with 5 different conflicting view points......I hate it.

Ok, so now you all know my true feelings when it comes to university group work. One ca only imagine how I felt when I learned that much of this class consisted of group work, not to mention the group was going to be comprised of 18 individuals, most of which I have never met in my life......With that being said, Tricia Coonan was an unbelievable leader, and took us to the promise land.  Tricia was not only constantly available for open communication through a number of outlets, but she was also a fun person who recognized that everyone in the group had their own personal lives that far surpassed the importance on one class.  As long we were able to accomplish adequate work within the due dates of each assignment Tricia had no quarrels with you.  However she was still readily available to let you know that you need to pick up the slack if you weren't pulling your weight.  These factors combined with awesome group members is what allowed our group to succeed.  I appreciate everyone in our group, and a special thanks goes out to Tricia for being wicked awesome.

One of the key ways to tell whether or not a group is under adequate leadership is to examine how well the group works together when the leader isn't present.  A successful leader should not have to constantly be present (micromanage) in order for the group to work well together.  A successful leader has already established a common "theme", of which the rest of the group can follow no matter what the circumstances are.

This is apparent in all parameters of life.  One  that I was able to whiteness this personally was through my internship a couple of summers ago.  I worked for group RCI, which is a large timeshare investment company located out of Indianapolis, Indiana.  I was placed in a cubicle amongst hundreds of other employees.  Many of these employees were extremely hard workers, and did not need much guidance when it came to getting their work accomplished and on time, however there are always going to be social loafers.  Around 20% of the employees that I worked with truly hated their jobs.  This was evident when you would walk by their cubicles and see them watching videos or writing personal emails on company time.  Since much of the work was assigned to teams, these people really hurt other employees by not accomplishing their portion of work.  This in turn made the company as whole look bad in the eyes of many upper level executives.  This just shows that one rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch.

IM2

Last week we turned in our second individual memo, which was a summary of a movie in terms of leadership, and it's components we have studied.  I found this exercise very interesting, by not having a specifically assigned movie to watch it much more pressure on us to decide on a movie that we could easily relate to some concepts of leadership. It took me a while to think of a relatively new movie that I could see myself writing two to three pages of leadership analysis. Luckily I stumbled across a movie that my roommate had recently purchased, Body of Lies, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, who happens to be one of my favorite actors.

I thought that leaving the decision to us as to what movie we would pick to analyze really added another element to this project. This made us consider the decision making process, which is an important skill for any leader to possess.  It is extremely important to be able to make decisions in a timely matter as a leader. People are depending on you to make the right decisions, and if you do not have the ability to be confident in the decisions you make, how is anybody going to have confidence in you to lead them? Our ability to decide on a movie that we could explain to Dr. Feinberg in terms of leadership showed him that we had the ability to capitalize on his lenience with this matter.  This shows that we do not constantly have to be micro-managed, and can make decisions that our superior can agree with, which is an early sign of leadership in an individual.     

Decision Making Exercise

In class on wednesday each group participated in a decision making activity.  The scenario was that we were all survivors of a plane that crashed 65 miles off course somewhere in the desert.We were left with 15 items to help further our survival, and it was up to us how maximized each items use. The first step of the activity was to rank the items from 1 - 15 individually.  After this was done each group convened on it's own and made a group list that was decided on by the entire group as a whole.  Needless to say team Wicked Awesome put their collective heads together to gain the lowest score by far out of all of our colleagues.  Our group score was 16, which was considerably lower than that of any other group, or any one individual within our group.  This showed that leadership can become a much more successful process when attacked by a team rather than one individual trying to take control of the situation.  Our group leader, Tricia, allowed everyone ample time to put their two sense in, and then allowed everyone to give feedback after each decision was made.  She showed great leadership qualities while trying to manage 18 different peoples ideas and suggestions.

I thought this exercise was a great opportunity for not only the group leaders to show that they can take charge and lead a group of people to a common conclusion, but it also gave other students in the group an opportunity to step up and show that they can handle group work as well.  It could not have been accomplished by any one person, and I am extremely pleased as to how my group handled the exercise.