Program Learning Outcome #2: Apply Team Building and Decision Making Skills to Class Projects
The prominence of this learning objective throughout the BTAS coursework cannot be overstated! This is the area in which I experienced the most significant improvement.
While working in groups, because of the accelerated course format, we had to work quickly to advance towards our final deliverables. Therefore, quick decision making was preferred. I found my contributions to be highly valuable in the “storming” phase of group dynamics, and after generating ideas about possible directions I could take, I would pitch my ideas to the team. Team communication would always pick up some momentum after this step, and while many of my ideas were adopted by the team, if the team course corrected towards a different direction, I could still witness how my ideas inspired our final decisions.
One aspect of team building and decision making that I noticed improvement in over the duration of the program is delegation of tasks. I strongly believe that my peers and I developed a strong sense of what our strengths are, and learned to communicate these strengths to the team when it was time to delegate the tasks involved in the scope of our project. Implementing keener awareness of our strengths ensured efficiency and productivity while also building trust between team members.
In the Public Images of Organization AIS 4018 class, our final team project effective and efficient decision making and team building skills. Our process went very smoothly because of the strong sense of group cohesion we developed. I felt that I played a vital role in deciding upon the project’s direction by utilizing my creative problem solving and idea generation skills in our brainstorming phase.
The project guidelines were to select a real company in good standing and develop a public relations strategy to guide the company in navigating a hypothetical situation. Deliverables for this project were a planning topic paper, our final strategy paper, and a presentation of our results. I pitched the idea of representing the BonBonerie bakery to the team, and they liked the concept and agreed to move forward with it. The situation that we constructed was that the company needed a public relations campaign to aid in the launch of a new online ordering service.
Here are the final deliverables.
I feel that this project is a great example of the “team building and decision making” learning objective because our final outcomes reflect our ability to capitalize on our individual strengths, the productive and respectful communication among members, and our application of creative problem solving techniques that aide in making compelling team decisions.