Leadership and teamwork skills focus on goal achievement, guide teams toward the achievement

of common goals, and maintain group cohesion, follow satisfaction, and efficient operations. A
leader is someone who organizes team meetings, takes charge of a team to achieve a common
goal, and strives to keep the group focused through supervision. Through various school projects,
I have learned the skills to become an effective leader and the importance of needing a leader to
achieve the group’s goals.

Here is What I Have Done

For my spring leadership and management class, we were assigned a team project, where we had
to create a cooperative strategy board game from scratch and present it to a panel of experts for
review. For our project, we had to develop an idea of a game we wanted to create and break it up
into four separate deliverables, in which at the end would all be put together for the final product
and presentation. We created a cops and robbers themed cooperative strategy game named
“Bankrupt” in which the robbers had to work together to rob a bank and escape without getting
caught by the cops. The document being presented is a deliverable our team had to complete in
which I created a template and facilitated everyone’s responsibilities for the work assigned.

Here is What it Means

I have had quite a few team projects since my college career began, and each one had its
difficulties along the way, while trying to maintain success. This team project was very
important to me because the grade of the project made up most of our grade for the course. This
project taught me so much about leadership skills, people skills, and time management skills.
Without having learned these skills our project would have been a failure and our overall
performance and grade would have really suffered.

We had all semester to complete the final product, but there were deliverables that were due
ahead of time to keep everyone on pace and on track, that way we weren’t waiting until the last
minute to try and muster up a complete project and presentation. When the team was formed
each member’s role started to become clearer. No one wanted to take a leadership role so, I
stepped up and facilitated and lead team meetings. I established our medium for communication
and the window of time in which we would communicate and meet. I then continued to take
more leadership roles in defining each person’s responsibility for each assignment we had to
complete. I always allowed for open discussion and ideas to flow back and forth. The leadership
role I took was to break the ground and get the project moving in the right direction, which
allowed the other members to use their strengths to create one of the coolest games I had ever
seen done from scratch with people I had just met that semester. I learned many effective
leadership skills and applied the strategies to what fit our team the best in each situation we were
faced with.

 Here is Where it Will Lead Me

Effective leadership skills will be extremely important in my future career in management. The
more and more people that I will manage and communicate I will need to alter my leadership
style to appeal to the wide variety of people I will be managing. Through this experience I
learned just how valuable leadership is. Not only for the team’s success but for personal success
too. If no initiative is being taken to lead and learn through experience after experience we will
never grow as people and as professionals. I am now more comfortable than ever working and
leading people from all different backgrounds and learning styles.

Please continue on to my final KSA, Thinking: Critical and Creative.