Case Study:
I wasn't prepared to be the leader of this team, in all honesty; however, this experience has helped develop my managerial skills by a ton. I learned the importance of teamwork and communication. I learned how to delegate work amongst my group mates and how to manage when one group member doesn't want to work as hard as the others. The service learning project also helped me learn how to trust people because you never know who will do their work or who will and how much they'll do. It helps me, as an inspiring health manager, to learn I must have faith in my group members. My writing skills improved as I could edit the paper and learn how to improve papers to make them better than originally stated. Another skill that improved greatly was presentation skills because I was able to learn how to present without notes and without looking at the slides. I learned how to use my brain, in a sense, to talk about whatever I was presenting. When I actually knew what I was talking about I didn't need slides or notecards to explain my topics.
This experience was a great experience because I had amazing group members to be with. They made my job as the leader easier to deal with because they shared the work evenly. We learned a lot about each other throughout the semester of working together. We all come from different backgrounds and age groups. One member that inspired me throughout the semester was David Scholl because of how much he went through in his lifetime. He is the oldest in our group at 30 years of age and he's is currently taking 24 units and still worked just as hard as anyone in this group. He's also been by himself since he was 15 years old and with all that he has gone through, it helped me learn that nothing is impossible. Meeting him gave me a more positive outlook on how I should live my life.
My schedule didn't allow me to be a consistent volunteer with the organization as I wished, but I did as much as I could for the organization as I could. The organization isn't like the other teams, where the organization needs major help with everything, so volunteering was a necessary asset that the organization needed from our group. If I had the time to volunteer with the organization I would in a heartbeat. If I had another seen another type of community based organization, I would volunteer right away because these organizations do so much for the community. They need all the help they can get and I believe everyone should do their part to get involved and help community based organizations succeed.
Our team worked very well with each other because we understood how to be effective and productive when we met up and the delegation tactics helped make the work even and fair for everyone. Our team would meet every Saturday to work on the paper. We would bullet all our ideas to help other build off them. Writing these papers with this group was extremely easy because we have so many great minds that we didn't struggle with this. The only thing I think our team could've done to improve on what our productivity is eliminating procrastination. We tended to get everything finished Sunday night or Monday morning, which isn't the ideal finishing date when it is due that Monday. This problem wasn't necessarily our faults but the lack of time. We all have busy schedules during the week and Saturday was the only time we could meet. Another problem we had was communication, I stated early that our communication improved over the semester, but we still struggle with it. We tended to talk over each other and I feel it hurt some group members when speaking up. We started to improve on this when our group got cut down to three members. When we got down to three members we could communicate more efficiently and everyone's voice could be heard. Those early problems didn't derail us, however, and we made it through the semester successfully.