Ron Bramhall's Public Library

As corny as it sounds, I’m a different student today, than I was back in September.

To be perfectly honest, in the beginning I was not ecstatic about taking this class. First I didn’t believe leadership and communication could be taught in a class. Second, I felt I had enough experience working in groups and writing. I (mistakenly) believed I had nothing more to learn. These negative impressions were completely false, and I’m happy to say I’ve learned a lot.

For ten weeks I worked with my team on a project with various phases that by no means could be successfully completed by any one person.  Such phases included an initial problem statement, a 12 page proposal, and a 25 minute presentation.  The amount of work needed to complete this project made it very clear that we not only had to delegate parts of each task, but that we had to delegate them efficiently. 

The problem with our presentation strategy was that some group members were not held accountable for their, previously agreed upon, assigned roles. I think that perhaps Natalie and I were more of silent contributors because the others weren’t at our meetings to realize how much extra work we put in to rewrite the written portion. This may have been the leading contributor in why the others didn’t feel it necessary to meet outside of our regular group meetings to create the slides. I had even mentioned in group meetings that we needed to start working on our presentation and yet they did not. Had I been brave enough to stand up to them and tell them that they needed to meet outside of group to get this done then we may have had a more fair allocation of assignments. This is something that I would like to work on in upcoming groups. I would like to hold all members accountable for their portion of the work and not have to pick up slack for anyone, unless absolutely necessary. I need to be more courageous in standing up for myself, as well as other group members, so that there are fewer inequalities in workload.

I think the in class talk really helped us to point out our weak points and talk about exactly how we are going to improve upon them.  It seemed as though everyone was honest when they had to say and when receiving evaluations, no one seemed to be upset with what others said but openly willing to work to make the team stronger as a whole.  I am looking forward to seeing how well our team does in the upcoming weeks.  I hope we remember everything that was talked about during Thursday’s class and can use it to benefit our team.

I have actually been able to relate what I am learning from my MGMT 321 class to certain aspects of this class. For example, we learned about the expectancy theory, which demonstrates that underachieving and lack of motivation are based on more than just an individual’s behaviors. If someone is low performing, it might signify that the right goals have not been set or they do not have the right training or resources. Secondly, if an individual in a group seems unsatisfied or the outcome of their work is poor, it could demonstrate that their leader has incorrectly diagnosed what motivates them.

In one of our team meeting, Brianne brought the stuff from home (Canada) which is the ketchup flavor chips. They are sooooo GOOD!!! It really reminds of one similar chips I have back home (Taiwan). We all get the taste of her chips during the meeting and everyone just love it!

As for my LDP, I started to see myself make a lot of progress. The biggest improvement I made was in my ability to verbally “model the way.” As I stated earlier in the term, I lead well by example, but sometimes don’t express my opinion verbally. I noticed when putting the presentation together and in the final stages of the proposal I came into my own as a leader vocally. I also began to trust my instincts a little more and go with my gut

However, there were several points I think that we could have improved on in our presentation to make it more effective. I believe our group could have been more persuasive in our message by stating how the solutions would fix our problem after we were finished describing each solution. Even though some solutions may seem straightforward, it’s always good to explain why something will be effective so the audience doesn’t have to fill in the blanks. Also, I think the slides were a bit scattered and made it difficult for people to always follow along. At first, I wasn’t 100% positive if the audience actually had a problem with these aspects and thought it might just be my paranoia kicking in again, but sure enough the audience response forms said they had a problem with how persuasive it was (or wasn’t, I should say).

Having the whole project done and behind me is a great feeling. I believe that over time I honed the skills that I wanted to improve and even in a setting where I was forced to work with people I did not get to chose. This is important to take forth into the professional world because in business you never know who you will be forced to work with or what challenges will face you but having gone through this experience I know that with a little extra work and elbow grease I can make it work and allow the group to be successful.

I remember meeting Ron in his office with Sean and Ron told us that the last thing we want to do for our presentation is memorizing. And that is very true. The whole night before presentation day, I practice in front of the mirror, but I didn’t memorize anything. Its true that when you know what you are talking about, you dont need to worry. The words will just come out as you talk. What is important is to make them in good orders to make the audience easier to follow the flow. So when the presentation day came, I do feel a little bit nervous but then I realize that I shouldnt be. So when it’s my turn to talk, I just talk like what I’ve been practicing the night before. I didnt use any note cards too because I find it harder to talk while reading notes. To my surprise, I didnt feel nervous at all and I just did it.