Decision Making

A cool decision making principle that was new to me was that because we never make choices outside of our alternatives, we should increase our alternatives by shooting high and broadening horizons. Although it seems obvious, I think a lot of the time close mindedness and a lack of creativity limits my available options and therefore realized outcomes. Having realized/learned this, the next time a weighty decisions arises I am going to make sure to take a couple steps back and think big so I can reduce my self-imposed limitations and find better courses of action.

The biggest problem I have as far as decision making goes involves me properly weighing costs and benefits when I have limited information. Usually when these situations occur, I pick whatever is most familiar, comfortable or easy, when perhaps I should choose some safe "risks" more often. For instance, one of the choices I will be deciding on for this weekend is wether to go to the campus dance, or instead go country dancing with my sister. I know how campus dances are, and they're fun, but I've never gone country dancing, I don't know much about it, and I don't want to miss out on a guaranteed fun dance.

I'll see what I decide, but the fact that something so inconsequential is one of my hard decisions just brought to my attention that for the most part I have already made most of my decisions as far as school and scheduling goes. Like we talked about in lab, I have already chosen to attend every class and get all homework assignments done, so I have reduced the amount of choices I would otherwise have to make on a day to day basis. I guess if it weren't for new decisions--even like which dance to go to--then life would be pretty boring and uneventful. But to answer the question (how I will combat my problem), a good criterion that I've picked up from my leadership book is to always consider your options against your priorities. Thus for my dance situation, since family is one of my lifelong priorities and because it is hard to get enough family time in here at college, I will go to the dance with my sister.

The hierarchy of decision making involvement was quite eye opening to me, and for my leadership role I am definitely going to start thinking of the different choices that need to be made in that light. Lately I have noticed that I've been seeking approval from everyone on the team for just about everything, but by having the hierarchy in mind and by considering the effect that my decisions will have on my teammates, I think I can be more efficient and effective in decision making, and thus a better leader for them.

My Mission Statement and how I Measure My Success

Real success for me is success with self. It’s not having things, but in having mastery--attaining victory within. Success for me is found in doing the things God would have me do and in becoming the person He knows and wants me to become.

So that's it, it's pretty broad, but to me it means that I can do absolutely anything I feel I should with the time I have been given. Some of the specific things I wanted to do in life is to be a teacher/mentor for others, I want to raise a wonderful family, I want to start and run many, many businesses, and eventually I feel like doing some public service something like that.

Time Management is so important as a leader because they must first be able to take care of themselves and must also be able to accomplish and coordinate lots of different things for others too. I know that in my leadership role (business team), if I hadn't been ahead in my classes I would not have been able to drop everything and go and work on our business. So time management really is important, and I wholly agree with trying spend the most time in quadrant one where you are doing what is important but not urgent (because you have planned ahead and have not allowed important things to become urgent).

To better manage my time I am going to make a chart with a list of the Important things that I need to do, and I will break those down into Urgent and Not Urgent categories so I can always be get done what I must and also plan ahead for the future. Another thing I want to do is to better track the time I spending studying and socializing, because as important as studying is, socializing and taking time for people is pretty important too.

An example of one of the weaknesses I have as a leader involves my perfectionism which leads to task micromanagement and sends a vibe that I lack the ability to delegate and trust my team mates. Although this weakness isn't to the point of ruining my teams, I often have to remember that certain details just don't matter as much as team building and cooperation, and actually I had to remind myself of that just yesterday during my business project.

Basically, what happened was that my team and I were baking 57 box cakes for our valentines day project, and as I stressed about keeping the workspace clean and about baking the cakes as quickly as possible, I feel like I was coarse at times and stepped on my teammates toes just to speed things up by a little bit. I understand that efficiency is really important, however it is not as important as the people on my team, and I felt bossy every once in a while when I told/suggested someone go do this or that, or when I didn't wait for them to catch up with me, and things like that. But I think it was most especially the way I led verbally that needs work, as well as my efficiency standards/expectations.

Like we talked about in class, perhaps I could overcome this weakness by working on my strength in leading by example. Further, I think I need to establish for myself and for the team, the expectations and goals we have before trying out something new, so that way we can all be on the same page and I won't have to push and prod them into doing things more quickly or more excellently.

In my group project for this class, the strengths of my team involve the ability each of us have to submit to the ideas and leadership of others and just work together as a team. We are all pretty responsible and committed and I do not feel anyone does more to lead than anyone else. From this strength we all benefit and our project is far more likely to succeed .

Team Progress

Currently I am working within two groups--my service project team for this class and my business team from my entrepreneurship class--and both groups are or have recently underwent the forming and storming stages.

So far I feel that forming has gone well in both groups. As fellow students, it's been nice that we all have similar purposes and aims for participating and succeeding together, and from that foundation getting to know each other and learning about each of our different strengths has been fairly easy. What has really helped me to get to know my teammates has been my respect and courtesy towards them, and just trying to accelerate the getting to know them process by looking for ways to complement and/or appreciate them. It's odd, but I probably would never have tried to get to know any of my teammates and would never have realized how excellent they are had we not been thrown at such projects together.

The storming stage occurred in both of my teams as well as we tossed around ideas for our projects. In the past, I know I've been far too critical of other's ideas, but having realized my error, I consciously decided to encourage every idea that was voiced and in the end we were able to agree on an idea that we all were excited about. However, storming wasn't over after that point because the next thing to do was to work out the small details. This stage is admittedly harder for me because I am a perfectionist and the little details and choices can seem to mean the world to me at times. I wouldn't say that I did great during our detail planning, however I think we were able to weather the storming because we had first laid a solid foundation during forming.

I've seen mainly one dysfunctions in my business team so far, that of avoidance of accountability. Particularly, there have been several assignments given out, however there has been a lack of progress reports and I find myself needing to ask how the assignments are coming along, which has been slightly difficult because the Fear of Conflict dysfunction seems to be at work as well. Anyways, I will solve this problem by turning the tables and teaching accountability by example; every time we get together for a meeting I will begin by reporting on the assignments I was supposed to do and then give everyone else an opportunity to do the same and be happy about what they accomplished for the team. If this method doesn't work I will explicitly inform everyone of the importance of accountability and then ask them to voluntarily report on their assignments in the future so we can achieve the benefits of accountability.

Wish me Luck :)