Tale of leadership and teamwork!
“How do I become the team lead?” — In my very first call with my Professor, I asked him this question as I decided on my practicum project. “A good leader is not self-proclaimed; you need to emerge as one by proving your worth!”
The professor may have forgotten about this, but I haven’t, clearly! As I was about to embark upon my practicum journey last October, I decided that I want to lead my team from a technical perspective and establish myself as a successful leader. I decided to prepare myself for the career switch after this graduation. I used to work as a Data Scientist for four years at IBM and now I wanted to move to a leadership role after graduation. So, I pushed myself and prepared to do this. As with almost everything else in life, it is easier said than done! I had no idea how to lead people or even how to establish myself as a leader!
Rewind to October 2021!
My team met with our practicum partner team for the first time in late October. We learned about the company, its services, and our project for the next nine months. It was overwhelming at first but that’s just how every beginning feels to me! After that, we had our first call with the MIP (MSBA Industry Partner), where we introduced ourselves and talked about the project. We assigned our tasks, but I chose to not only do my part but also check on other people to see if they needed any help. I talked to my team and asked them if they would be okay with me leading the call with our MIP. Fortunately, they were quite happy and gave me a green signal.
I believe that effective communication is the most important skill to become a good leader. Fortunately, my oratory skills have always been my strength. I have a lot of experience in public speaking, and I believe that helped me in gaining the trust of my fellow team members.
A good leader needs to be a good follower!
I believe that this is where most people fail as they don’t listen enough. I made sure to create an environment where my team members could speak freely and without any hesitation.
In any discussion, I would make sure that everyone feels accepted and validated for each of their points. I’m always eager to learn something if I don’t know it. As a result, I learned something or other from each of my team members and I gave them the credit for it.
Fortunately, my team members always spoke their minds and we all decided to learn from each other and be honest about our work. We started this culture of assessing each other works to improve and drop our comments anonymously so that no one would feel any negativity towards the other person.
A team is as good as its leader!
Over the period, I emerged as the team lead, and everyone started to look up to me for any help, discussion, or guidance. I accepted this role wholeheartedly and decided to work even harder to be the leader my team deserved. I believe that a good leader must be the hardest worker in the room! I tried my best to always stay on top of things, be it our weekly huddles, research work for the project, leading a technical discussion with the MIPs, or helping my teammates with any work.
Our project started a bit late than others due to some unavoidable issue. So, we had lesser time than all the other groups. I’ll agree that we all were quite worried initially but I’m glad that my team helped each other to catch up on tasks and decided to make the best with what we had rather than sulking about what went wrong. This was one of our biggest hurdles as a team and I couldn’t be happier to look back and see how great we did!
All’s well that ends well!
As we reached the end of the quarter, we needed to give two presentations, one in class and the other to all the MIPs. Since I saw that my team members were a little bit nervous about that, I decided to volunteer for the first presentation. I was quite happy to see that one of my team members got inspired and decided to join me. We did well as a few students called our presentation quite interesting in the later Q/A session.
This little token of appreciation gave confidence to us, and I saw that other team members volunteered to give the second presentation to the MIPs. I stepped down happily and pushed them forward as there is no I in the team. The judgment day came, and our presentation went better than we expected. All the partners were quite happy and excited about the work we had done and all the plans for the rest of the practicum.
In conclusion, I can say that it has been an eventful journey with lots of learning so far! Obviously, there is a lot of scope for improvements, but I am sure that my team will only go upwards and onwards from here.
