Week 1

During the class time we were able to watch the dateline The Deep Dive. This video helped a lot during the presentation and will continue to help me as a leader in the future. The biggest take away from the video that I grasped was the philosophy that no idea should be left of the take, and that rather than dismissing an idea you have to build upon it. A quote that I failed to get who stated it in class went along the lines to say that you should fail often in order to be able to succeed sooner. This quote is great and I will at it to my inspirational quotes log. It is sometimes those type of quotes that you need to reflect back upon through tough or troubling times. One strategy that I need to work on in order to take myself to the next level in leadership is being modest despite being correct. I find it all too easy to shove something in a peers face when they are wrong, and need to take a step back in these situations and realize how I am coming across to the other person.

We also reviewed the stages that most teams go through the forming, storming, norming, preforming, and adjourning. In the break out session we laid down ground rules as instructed in class. I feel that this helped us throughout the projects. And it allowed us to proceed as needed when it situation came up in regards to decision making, absences, meetings, and work not being completed. We also covered what was important to the team, positive and negatives of teams, and what type of leadership style to use. After we confirmed the group rules, and decided to take the real team discipline approach, we started reading each individual case study, one after another. After all the cases were discussed, we were able give input as to which top case studies we wanted to pursue as a team. It came down to the case study that I had presented which was based upon the philanthropic organization of Workcamp, who helps communities maintain homes that the homeowners are having trouble physically and financially themselves.

Week 2

Week two was primarily spent on hashing out how to proceed forward in order to get the most work done. We all wanted to be ahead of schedule and get as much as we could get done, so that we would have plenty of time to prepare for the presentation at the end and to make final touchups to the paper.

In class we covered type a personalities who are do it yourself, and type b is of the nature that if it isn’t broken don’t fix it. If there is no conflict in a group there tends to be a high possibility of group think. We also talked about evaluating and appreciating others values. A list of the motivational languages was a good review by covering:

Words of affirmation:

Spending quality time in person

Gifts

Acts of service

Physical touch

For our team work session we went over the rest of the delegations of tasks and what each person could contribute to the project. We also started identifying the overlying issues that needed to be addressed in the case study; also known as the root causes. In this session we seemed to spend a lot of time just working on task behavior, and not as much time on social behavior. We all seemed to be of the mentality that we should rush to get as much done as we could. On that lead to our e area that lead to a little more social interaction was our group collaboration of the previous weeks team name T4, which we turned into a logo.

Tari-ism: “Listen to learn and learn to listen.”

Week 3

We primarily spent our time covering conflicts in teams and the different opportunities that an individual can contribute to a case: skills, contributions, technical, subject matter expert, devil’s advocate, interpersonal skills, problem solving or decision maker, and/or presenter.

For the lesson part of class the biggest topic that resonated with me was the three rules.

1. Don’t be concerned about making yourself herd

2. Be truthful, don’t try avoiding the matter (issue)

3. Speak in love, build up others

I find when looking at conflict it is hard to come into productive conflict, usually someone in the issue takes matters personally, instead of looking at the issues or tasks. I took this information while looking at our case study, and tried to use it, when making objective decision making.

In the third week we decided it would be wise for us to set a better agenda for our breakout sessions so that we would be better equipped at steering back on track when we get sidetracked with idea’s. And so that we could accurately judge how much time we had to dedicate to certain topics. We spent time compiling what everyone had completed during the week from the last meetings assigned delegations.

Week 4

In week four I was unable to make it to class, since I was sick. I was able to email my cohort earlier in the day to let them know that I wouldn’t be able to make it, and that they can delegate work for me in my absence and vote on matter in order to proceed with the project. The team did a wonderful effort on keeping me informed by sending me notes covering what was discussed and decided for the group project. In class the group covered team building, and why teams fail. I was tasked with completing a few additional parts for the case to complete the week, which included starting the PowerPoint, and compiling the main research objectives to develop a survey. A main theme that was pointed put during this group session was the fact that we didn’t have someone keeping a close enough eye being a time keeper, so we could get through our agenda. Comment by tstein:

Week 5

For our second to last class gathering we had a majority of the paper put together and a basis of what we wanted to include in the power point. We were able to further hone the paper/ polish it, and then laid out the final template for the power point. Since we had all been assigned different areas of the paper to research we thought it was only fitting for everyone to go in during the weekend compile that part of the power point. I feel we had a little bit of a storming session for a majority of the PowerPoint layout, since Tari was the annotator we had her pull up the PowerPoint that they had started the week prior in class and the PowerPoint I had compiled online. The majority of the group was in conscious that we should condense the slides to not have the information on T4 and that caused a hang-up with ++++, she seemed to want to just keep last week’s layout. I feel her hostility was in part to changing the design but also the fact that she was on vacation and had come in to collaborate with the team anyways. After going back and forth we were able to talk through the layout and come to a mutual decision that we should keep a little brief overview of T4 but not go over the culture, mission, history as in depth as our paper. Comment by tstein:

3 Questions

1. What about myself am I most proud of?

I would have to say I am most proud of my ability to help others in the group. When someone needed some suggestions, a second set of eyes, or help on their assigned potion I was able to give my input or help where possible.

2. What about the team am I most proud of?

I am very proud of our team, we were able to find the areas we were strongest in and work our abilities to benefit the project. Not only that we were very courteous and professional when it came to decision making, letting everyone give their input and being able to come to a resolution when problems arose.

3. How has creativity enhanced the efforts?

When I think of creativity and this project two areas come to mind, the first being the logo for our team. We were able to come up with different concepts individually and then put them together to make one logo. The other is the perspectives of each other and building upon everyone’s view of the case studies main root problems.

Week 6

To finish the class we presented as a group our final report to the board of trusties for the workcamp organization and were able to get feedback on the presentation. We also saw the other team’s presentation and give positive input and areas of improvement. As a team we were able to cover last minute how we were going to field questions,

Evaluation of the team: contributions/support

Tari-primary annotator, mission statement, and main lead when putting together the parts in the paper.

Tom-designed and put together all promotional material (beads, and chocolate), helped find and analyze peer reviewed articles, and collected information on similar organization

Dave- Covered the culture of workcamp and other organizations.

John- found and analyze peer reviewed articles and dynamics of philanthropic groups

Myself-collected data on the history of the project, gave in-depth knowledge of workcamp, setup and helped compile the group paper, and power point. Put together the survey and analysis of the survey. Structured most of the recommendations, and main objections of the project.

Overall

Group process, as a whole it was interesting to proceed through a group objective as a team effort, having an equal share of voting throughout. It was the first time I have approached a project this way, and it was a bit of a learning curve for all involved. Successes/failures what to do same/different. I feel that our team did a wonderful job pulling together in the final hour. One area that we could have improved upon is getting together the night before to go over the entire presentation to time ourselves, and have a little more congruency speaking after one another. A success was found during our question and answer section, in which we were successfully able to build off one another’s ideas. Secondly, as a group we did a great job of setting aside time outside of class to meet a couple times, in order to keep everyone on the same page and help wrap up the paper, and PowerPoint.

I am not quite sure if it would be a success or not if we were to complete the project having one main leader. I think that we would have been able to complete the task a little faster by being able to delegate and work through things more efficient. On the other hand I think the creativity, imagination, and collaboration would have been limited. Thus, making the project not as successful in the end.