The Elements of Team Leadership focused on developing effectiveness in leading, delegating, and communicating within team environments. A very important theme throughout this course of the concept of emotional intelligence in teams, team management, and effective team processes. This class was team based so we were placed into teams during the first week of class and stayed with that team for the whole semester. In these groups, we would discuss the topics of the books that we were reading for class (“The Emotionally Intelligent Team: Understanding and Developing the Behaviors of Success” and “Group Dynamics for Teams”), we would take group quizzes together in which we would be able to deliberate and discuss why we thought each answer was correct or incorrect, and we also started to plan a Service-Learning Project. One of my team members was involved with College Mentors for Kids, so we decided that we were going to work with them. Unfortunately, our time to plan and execute that was cut short due to COVID-19 and having to move classes online, but we still wrote a project plan for what we would have done with them given the opportunity. This project was very interesting because it allowed us to put our team leadership skills into effect to determine how to work as a team to guide another team in how to lead more efficiently.
I think this course has been my favorite and the most influential in my leadership studies during my time here at Virginia Tech. My team members impacted my views and perspectives on leadership. They helped me find more of my voice when it comes to group work because they were actually interested in what my thoughts were and asked to hear my opinion. I quickly became friends with those team members which allowed us to work together better than a group that can’t mesh well. We also quickly learned how to debate and come to a consensus on things that we might have disagreed on. While learning about team leadership, I was able to be immersed into a real situation where we had to go through so many of the things as a group that we had talked about in class.
The first artifact that I have from this class is a diagram of emotional intelligence. It was something that we discussed and focused on for the whole semester. The second artifact that I have is the Table of Contents from the Service-Learning Project that we worked on throughout the semester.
Marley's Leadership Blog 