Anthony Babic
Mr. B
Lead
13 November 2018
Lead Reflection
While attending and participating in the USF Challenge course i was able to not only learn how to lead others but also how to follow as well. Some individual things that I learned were understanding my role in the group and also using communication to trust and get the best effort out of everyone involved. This course relied a lot on others and my group leader did say you couldn’t have done any of these alone and I’ve always struggled asking for help but when we realized we needed each other to do it, it became much easier.
The first thing that I applied to the challenge course was practicing my ability to lead people I didn’t know that well. During our activities many different people took leadership roles. Each person was able to use there personal gift to lead each way. As a group if anyone had a good idea we wanted them to speak out about it. The behaviors that I would describe as showing leadership were openness and positive attitude. Openness because the leaders needed to be open to new ideas and positive attitude because we needed to not get down on each other so that we could do the best job possible. As a group we didn’t have many difficulties. The main difficulty was continuing to follow through on our idea’s throughout each and every activity. The way we persevered through these challenges was by keeping a positive attitude. Throughout our activities the leadership roles did shift. I can remember two specifically. On the rope swing activity Troy Campbell took charge and on the activity with the boards and individual blocks Issaius Pompa took charge. In these activities neither of these leaders acted as a dictator. Both of them listened to new ideas and took constructive criticism as they were leading.
The second idea that I applied to the challenge course was understanding myself. Throughout the activities I went back and forth from being a primary leader to being an active listener who brought up new ideas. I feel that I contributed to the leadership effort because every person in our group played a part. We needed every person in our group to be successful. My values and beliefs did help shape my experience of the challenge course. Typically I take more of a frontrunner leader approach oppose to being a “sidekick” per say. Through these challenges I was comfortable being a beginner. This is an idea we have talked much about in class and it is something that I applied to the the challenge course. An example of this was when we did the activity with the two large boards and the two large platforms. As I was the first person to go across, I stood to the side and watched as the rest of my group leaded to accomplish our goal. This was a time that I didn’t understand how to approach the activity so I just watched and listened.
The last idea’s that I applied to the challenge course were communication and listening along with making group decisions. The main idea that interfered with the ability of some group members to listen was when things start to take long. If some of our group ideas did not work as fast as we would have hoped people would lose focus and this would interfere with our groups listening skills. On the other hand the elements that helped our group listen well were things like letting one person speak at a time and letting each others idea’s be heard before we constructively criticized what they had to say. When people in our group wanted to stray away from our main ideas we listened to what they had to say and took action on it. We would give most everyone’s ideas a chance. Nothing immediately got shot down with no thought. This is the reason I believe our group was successful. Making group decisions coincides with communication and listening. Throughout the day I was very satisfied with the decisions my group made. There was no decision that our group made that upset or disappointed me. The roles in our group were established based off of which activity we were doing. Different people had different input and skills in each challenge. These roles did adhere through each activity. For example, on the 12 foot wall activity Anthony Babic and Miles Childers took the lead as they were the tallest ones in the group. They used their height to help push every person in our group up the wall. Overall I liked the decisions my group made. We were successful because there was no bad blood between our group and nobody tried to one up another person.
Overall this course made me apply different leadership skills that I was use to and some new roles for me. Things we discussed in class to skills I use throughout my everyday life I applied it all. I was able to learn how to apply different leadership skills by watching my group members lead. These activities helped me learn more about my classmates and how to lead with them in the future. My group was able to take part in 5 of the different challenge course activities. We had a different degree of success in each of these activities. With each one of the challenges I was able to apply and learn different leadership skills. I would definitely recommend to continue this field trip in the future as it was a very important learning experience for our class.