Take 1..Take 2

In "Mind your Business" I was reading about Heresy and Blanchard’s situational leadership. They talk about how different kinds of people require different levels leadership and involvement. On Monday in my team’s class Sara and Ryan asked us to break up into small groups and each record a portion of a commercial. Following the Situational Leadership theory, they were able to delegate the task, and let us perform according to our abilities. The task was like a game, so it did not require a whole lot of urgency, besides a time constraint, and the maturity level of each member was high enough that Sara and Ryan were not holding anyone’s hand.

Another article in "Mind Your Business" talks about an exercise called "Lost on the Moon" in which a group decides what would be the most essential items if someone was stuck on the moon. Thinking about creating that commercial, we had to decide as an entire class what were the most vital facts to be included in the video and then in our small groups we needed to again break it down. If I was leading a group in he corporate world, it is just as essential to know the direction that I'm heading, and what the project I am working on requires. The difficult part is trying to get everyone your working with to agree what the most vital parts of Leadership are, which was what are commercial was themed around.

One of the best things about Monday and making the commercial was that I really think we all felt pretty sure of what the goal was and how to put the project into action. In the book, "Managing Teams" one of the cautions that Lawrence Holpp gives managers is how important it is to "move slowly with teams." He talks about "planning your objectives, goals, structures, needs, and potential problems." In our discussion of the "how" and "what" our commercial was going to be, Ethan Lunn played an essential devils advocate by pointing out a problem he had with the basic format. I really do think that if no one disagrees, it’s like the "going to town" example, that we will just let it happen.

Overall, I really did enjoy this activity, I think that in leadership there are going to be many times that we, as leaders, will find ourselves all being called to work together to create, direct, follow and serve. And as simple as making a commercial may seem, it really did test each of us as individuals on how and where we were to fit into the task.