Collaborative Projects, Essay Example

Strengths:
1.  Leadership
2.  Creative Thinking

Weaknesses:
1.  Delegation
2.  Followership

Suggestions for Improvement:
1.  While leading a project do not micro-manage the outcomes and let the people involved in the project manage their respective areas of responsibility.
2.  Try to be an active listener and I need to understand that in order to be a good leader I must also understand when I need to support and follow.

Experience

While preparing for a holiday gathering during the winter, I had multiple family members coming in from disparate parts of the country.  In order to bring everyone together and pull of a coordinated event there were multiple aspects that had to be planned and implemented in order to provide adequate accommodations for not only those family members traveling in but also not to put undue stress on the family members providing the accommodations.  The first order was to plan the actual event and the location.  The overall plan was to spend the entire day together cumulating in a family dinner.  There were three major areas of concern I had when planning this event.  I had to plan for travel to, during and from the event, nightly accommodations for those not from the local area and the dinner logistics for the final night.

The initial preparation started three months out and it required almost the full amount of my time to make phone calls, request inputs from family members and multiple funding requests from each family member to support the majority of the dinner for the final night.  At first there was an overwhelming amount of work that needed to be accomplished and not enough time to accomplish it.  I divided the tasks into the three areas and tried to find the appropriate member of the family to take charge of that section.  I delegated the individual responsibility to three family members and I provided the overall objectives that I needed to accomplish.  I was able to manage the project at a higher level and entrust the individual tasks to responsible members of my family.  After pushing the individual tasks to a more manageable level I was able to provide the oversight necessary to guide the holiday event to a successful conclusion.

At first the project was leaning toward an unsuccessful result but after taking a step back and creating a collaborative team of individual contributors I was able to focus on leading the project to a successful completion.  I learned that leading is not doing things right by myself but doing the right things with a team.