The model we created was very easy for me to relate too. I played sports my entire life so I know exactly what it’s like to be on a team. The parts of our model that I felt were the most important were leadership, coordination, problem solving and goal oriented. I try to relate all teams that I am on to some of the successful teams I have been on and these are the most important traits that I have found to make up successful teams. However, it is not always easy to relate sports to projects that we do for school. Some of the differences are in sports you can physically will yourself to try harder, this is not always possible in school. There are still many similarities I was able to find between them. The most important to any team is leadership. Without leadership you will not be able to accomplish any of your goals. I learned how important leadership was at a very early age in my life. I would consider my dad to be my first leader. He taught me the basics of how to play sports and certain techniques and adjustments I could make to help me accomplish my goals. As I grew and entered more competitive sports I gained new leaders, leaders who could help me accomplish my most challenging goals. Many of the best inspirations in my life were not actually coaches though, often times they were my peers. I was always someone who would see how hard my teammates were working and would get motivated to match their effort and intensity. I would see the manner in which they acted or how they carried themselves and I would want to replicate that. I believe this peer leadership was the type of leadership our team used. We did not have authoritarian leadership, we had democratic leadership. We all saw how hard each and every one else was working and we wanted to help the team equally. No one wanted to be the weak link who caused others to lose points on their project. The next part of the model I found to be important was coordination. Without a coordination you are not a team, you are just a group of individuals. Every team needs a leader to coordinate their team members in order to be productive. Sport teams use a coach to organize their players but we had to organize ourselves. For our team, in order to be productive had to divide the work up equally so no one had to do too much. Seeing as its nearing the end of the semester, we were all overloaded with class work from other classes and studying for other exams, so it was important to make sure that no one had to do too much work. In order to make sure it was evenly divided, we broke up our big essay into three six hundred word parts. After that everyone else was in charge of their own web page. Breaking up the project like this ensured that no one was ever over worked. I believe the next parts of a successful team go together, which are problem solving and accomplishing a team specific goal. There has never been a successful team that did not have to overcome certain obstacles in order to accomplish anything. I previously mentioned that we had problems with leadership and establishing a leader that could evenly divide up the work and make sure we were all coordinated, but that wasn’t the only problem that we encountered. Some of the other problems we encountered were finding a way to get all of our work in on time, and making sure we could all access that work whenever we needed to. However, these issues were solved by using google docs. The biggest issue we encountered was figuring out who would do the small things, such as who would make the model and would combine everything into the website. These problems were eventually overcome by someone stepping and being a leader by taking initiative. Every time someone would step up and say, I can do this. This was very crucial to our team’s success. As I have written, leadership, coordination, problem solving and accomplishing a specific team oriented goal are the most important part to any team. Without leadership you cannot have coordination, and without problems you cannot have a goal. That is why I believe these are the four most important parts to any team.
James Walsh 175 word introduction
My name is James Walsh and I believe I did a lot to help our team achieve our goals and be as successful as possible. The first thing I did to help the team was to participate while making the model. I worked with Jiayu and Abdulrahman in determining which qualities were most important in order to create a successful team. The next area in which I helped our team accomplish our goals was using the model in order to divide up our essay. We realized we could assign everyone two or three parts of the model in order to make sure everyone contributed to the group equally and effectively. For my part I was assigned the introduction, leadership, coordination and cooperation. The next part of the project I worked on was my individual essay on how I personally related to our model. This was my favorite part of the project because it brought back a lot of really awesome memories on prior teams I have been on in. Overall, I was very happy with how our project turned out.