Week 9: Reflection on Team Leadership

I agree with the benefits of team leadership. In my experience, the dialog created by team discussion of goals and solutions far outweighs the individal approach to problem solving. Team leadership allows for ideas from various perspectives to be discussed and a better solution to result.

I have had a lot of experience with the concepts of team leadership in the committees that I have run and other projects which I have been a part of. Although there are obvious benefits to this direction of leadership, the obvious downfalls are what usually come into play when team leadership is put into practice. Rarely do you see a team that works in a neutral way. In my experience, there have always been issues with individual agendas and submissive personalities.

The issue seems to commonly arrise where you have individuals who want something for themselves and not necessarily for the good of the direction of the team. Greed or personal agendas tend to skew a lot of what ends up being discussed or solved. Team leadership requires that there is a particular appointment of the individuals in the team to create a cohesive thinktank with similar goals and objectives.

The other issue that seems to arrise even more often in the teams that I have worked in is the problem of submissiveness. The advantages of team leadership is that the various people involved need to create a dialog with varying perspectives. If individuals sit on the sidelines and don't become involved, then they are useless with regards to the objectives of the team. As many people in the teams that I have been a part of were appointed, they rarely felt the necessity to become fully involved in the mission. The people involved in the team need incentives, and incentives create greed, and we are now in a circle issues.

I enjoy the concepts of team leadership, and I have definately become better at fostering the ideals of a team method, however this type of mentality takes experience in order to get a group dialog really working. Each time I become involved in team efforts, I have noticed that the teams become more productive and I have a better understanding of how to keep people involved and on track toward the issues by playing the roles that we mentioned in class.