Being a team leader: My experience

Hi, my name is Arm. I’m currently a freshman at BAScii Chula. In this post, I will discuss my experience with my marketing class so far.

My previous team

To understand my expectations for this term’s class, I should tell you about my previous team. Prior to this marketing class, we had a management class last term, which had the same structure. In that class, I was a team member in a team that had a really good work environment and did really well. Most of that is down to having a good leader, as well as the right mix of personalities and skills. Since the team went so well, I didn’t experience many issues, which doesn’t prepare me for this term.

My current team

During the break I had an opportunity to volunteer to be a team leader. I applied, thinking that it will be a good way to push myself to develop my leadership skills. Maybe the push was a little too hard…

Before talking about the issues, I should talk about the dynamics of my team. Starting off, my team didn’t know each other well. This, combined with my introverted nature, resulted in really uncomfortable situations. In meetings only a few people would be talking which makes it really hard to do anything other than just assigning work. Out of meetings things aren’t much better.

All of this results in the work not being as good as I would like it to be, and I only have myself to blame for that, of course. Often times there is miscommunication when assigning work, which results in effort being wasted. It is also hard to keep track of what each member is doing, as there is not much communication.

In an attempt to solve these issues, I’ve tried multiple things. At first, I didn’t know my team members’ names. It might seem like an easy thing to fix, but I’m really terrible at remembering names so during team meetings I would have a sheet with each member’s first name and nickname listed. Another thing I did was introducing Trello to our workflow. The thought behind it was that having a system where the status of each task can be seen will help with keeping track of what is going on. It wasn’t that effective since it wasn’t really used enough to be useful.

To be honest, this experience has given me a reality check on how much more I have to develop in order to be a good leader. Compared to my first day things are already getting much better. I’ve been able to settle on a group of a few team members that I can comfortably talk to, and my team members made good efforts to communicate more, which I really appreciate. We are currently working on our final project, which will be our last assignment together.

Overall, being a team leader have taught me a lot and I don’t regret applying for it. I will learn from this experience and develop more as a leader and as a person.