Team Finance

I am a former Vice President of a culturally based student organization. Our mission was to provide exposure and education to Asian cultures for any students at our university through events and programs. As I was working with e-board members, we had to ensure that we follow some leadership components in order to build a high performance team. First component that we had to put emphasis on was communication and I believe it’s the most important factor not only in leadership but also in relationship throughout individual’s lifetime. As a former Vice President of a student organization, I had to have effective communication skills to communicate well with team members when creating events and activities. Planning events and activities was not an easy task which required various things such as communication, e-board meeting, involvement of faculty members, and approval from school. Hence, communication played as a huge role in e-board meeting to come up with the date of events, maximum number of people who can participate in the event, and a theme of an event as well as meeting the deadline for an approval of an event.

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Teamwork also was the essential and challenging component when working with e-board members. Team is a group of people who work interpedently to complete a common task which is given to them. Because a group of people are involved in a team, there might be situations where you didn’t expect to be occurred. For example, our organization had a general meeting once a week throughout the semester and e-board meeting was required in advance of a general meeting to discuss about what educational programs we should include and what food to serve. Specific tasks are given to each e-board members and all of them have a certain job during a general meeting but there was few times when one of our member forgot to finish their task. As a result, not only it affected our team members to be united, but also a fiasco in the plan of a general meeting. Instead of disappointing at the fact that one of our team members didn’t do their job, we as a team decided to email our organization members to give a better understanding of those missing task and what we were going to explain in the general meeting. For a lesson, we learned the significant impact on individual e-board members and how they can affect a team as a whole.

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Moreover, trust played as a significant factor in building an effective student organization. I believe that trusting each team members allow them to be more willing to share their thoughts and concerns. When tasks were given to each of our e-board members, we trusted each other by showing an encouragement and helping each other when someone was falling behind. Motivation was also a significant component. We motivated each other by presenting awards that previous e-board members received before. We also contacted former e-board alumni to get motivation from them since they already went through struggles that we were going through. We thought that by listening to former e-board members on their experience would help us to get motivate to grow up as a student organization and it actually did help us. I believe that purpose of trust in an organization is equivalent to trust in relationship between mentor and mentee.  In mentor and mentee relationship, mentee is willing to be vulnerable to a mentor because mentors give advices and encouragement based on the conversation between them. This example illustrate that trusting each team members, while operating a meeting, have positive effect on their willingness to be vulnerable with each team members. Gathering many of team member’s thoughts and opinions produce an organization opportunities to make the right decision.  Our e-board members trusted each other by involving in activities that are not related to our organization, such as going out on a picnic or going bowling, to get to know each other more.

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Illustration of all these components that I listed above fall into leadership skills. I believe that leader needs to be educated in these factors such as communication, teamwork, trust, and motivation to make an effective team. As a former Vice President of a student organization, I was able to work with team members accordingly with an assistance of President and always taking a first step as a good example of an organization. I would say that the time I was involved in a student organization was the successful year.