14 thoughts on “Leadership Academy – Leading Creative Teams – Nov 16 2019”

  1. Before actually going to this event, I expected it to be like any other team building based seminar or retreat with the team building exercises and such. Although I will say that, the title of the event doesn’t do any justice because it was more about building better team and communication skills than it was about leadership itself. Through it I was able to learn that a leader doesn’t necessarily have to be a literal commander, but one that values and treats themselves equal to anyone else on their team or group. On a related note, I also learned that I should be more vocal because I noticed I was mainly quiet throughout the team exercises. This activity aided in further understanding the project and a lot more of the environment side of things regarding computer science. In the future, we will have to work in a team and develop skills to not only voice and contribute to the team, but also to be a good leader when in those situations. Personally, I wouldn’t really want to go to events such as this mainly because these sort of things should just be natural to people, and I typically keep to myself.

  2. On November 16th, I attended the Leadership Academy Seminar #2 – Leading Creative Teams for my second extracurricular event. Before I attended the event I was nervous because I did not what what I was expecting. I had zero idea as to what the Seminar was about or what I was going to do. I like to know what I am getting myself into before doing it. And in these activities I didn’t really know what I was going to be doing. Once I knew what was going on I was excited to see how important leadership is and how they are different types. While attending the event I learned a lot from it. We had a group activity discussing the differences between creative teams and transactional teams. And I was really interested to see how different they are but at the same time how much each team is needed and how they go hand and hand. This helps understand computer science but showing how working in groups in a creative teams need to work differently in achieving a goal. I would like to attend an event like this to learn more.

  3. Going to this event was practically a shot in the dark for me. The web page description didn’t explain much as to what the attendees were expected to be doing at the event. Perhaps this was intentional because those attending should have the expectation/drive to adapt and adjust to what tasks were presented. This would be very appropriated considering some of the tasks that were presented at the event were left intentionally vague as to allow the attendees to create their own paths to a solution.
    The seminar had an interesting variety of activities spread throughout the event that helped show first and second hand examples of the different kinds of good leadership. These included, of course, a talk from a speaker, group brainstorming, as well as “challenges” which had groups, lead by an elected leader, come up with solutions to problems and improvements to items found throughout the MTCC building. Thanks to this combination of tactile and verbal teaching methods I was able to develop a strong understanding of the differences between the more creative and the more methodical kinds of leadership strategies, as well as how important a leader’s role is in shaping the outcome of a project.
    Although the event was a fun experience, if I were to attend another event similar as this one again I would like to be sure that the activities taking place would be different from the ones I experienced here. This would be so I could further learn with different experiences, as I believe this event thoroughly presented and covered it’s intended message.

  4. The event was composed of a discussion of different types of teams, different types of leadership, team management, measuring success within the team, there were leadership exercises to practice leadership skills and show a type of leadership. The exercise had a particular characteristic, lack of time, resources, and unclear instructions, these were intentional, according to the organizer, in order to make it somewhat realistic as he said that there were going to be times in which we would lack these things. I went to the activity thinking that it would help me improve my leadership skills further than my previous experience as leader of various teams. I learned about the fact that not all teams are the same and because of this there is a need to modify the methods of leadership depending on the type of team. This activity helped me understand that there will be a team a team component in the field of computer science and because of this there is a need for good leaders to lead the team in order to get things done. I would personally attend this activity again, in order to improve my leadership skills and understanding of leadership skills in order to make sure that, in the case I ever have to lead a team to create something, I will be able to do effectively and efficiently.

  5. Before going to the leadership academy, I was really tired. I didn’t get a good sleep the night before so I walked in sleepy and slightly nervous. Walking in at first, I didn’t know what was going to happen. First, we were in groups and learned about the types of leaders. They gave us two large sheets of paper with charts. We had to brainstorm and come up with the advantages, disadvantages, and essential of each type. After the presentation, we did group simulations of what makes a group leader. The goal and task was simple, but very vague. In these simulations, I learned how I learned about the problems and how to lead the discussion.
    In the beginning, I couldn’t see how this would be able to connect with computer science. As I went through with Leadership Academy, I soon began to realized that coding is not just a one person job. Large projects are not all programed by one person, but a team of people highly specialized in their own areas. Without a good leadership, it can be difficult to keep the group together. Everyone has different ideas and too many could affect the efficiency of the team and product.
    I’d like to attend this activity again, because this has helped my understand the difficulty of the role as leader. The leader has to hear everyone’s ideas and choose between two. Not only that, they have to guide and inspire the team members. Overall, this was a fun and wonder experience.

  6. Before going to the leadership academy seminar on November 16th, I expected it to be a lecture about leadership traits and how an individual can cultivate these traits in different scenarios and environments. I was initially hesitant and a bit nervous going into this seminar, as I didn’t really think it was something I am interested in. However, I decided to get out of my comfort zone and give it a shot anyways.
    The event consisted of many different activities, including talks about leadership, group activities, and group discussions. The speaker, Jeremy Alexis, discussed how to build traits in order to become an effective leader. One of the traits I recall from the talk is courage, which Jeremy stated how being prepared and brave enough to keep moving forward against obstacles is a valuable asset as a leader.
    This event helped me understand computer science better because it made me realize that we are guaranteed to face difficult problems relative to computer science in the future. But having the ability to push through these problems and finding alternative solutions without giving up easily is what will make me successful. In addition, computer science sometimes requires working with groups, and I learned that taking an active role in these groups by assisting and contributing with groupmates will make the task at hand much easier.

  7. Before going to the leadership academy seminar, I felt very unmotivated to attend. I thought that it would be a complete waste of time which I could have allocated to other areas. Moreover, I thought that I wouldn’t be able to contribute to any of the activities. Instead, the seminar turned out to be very insightful and quite fun, and I actually had quite a bit to contribute. At the seminar, we learned about the differences between transactional (traditional) leaders and leaders of creative teams. Transactional leaders typically make the decisions for the rest of the group and take responsibility, whereas leaders of creative teams are more willing to accept input from the team and diffuse the responsibility with team autonomy. The seminar discussed how one methodology isn’t wholly superior to the other, but that there are different contexts in which one may be better than the other. The seminar also gave us an in-depth demonstration of what being a leader in a team with restrictions might look like. Teams were given a vague prompt with limited resources and time and leaders were expected to guide the team without giving input. This activity’s purpose was to mimic difficult situations which may be typical in the average workplace. Given another opportunity to attend, I would probably attend another seminar. The seminar gave a free pizza lunch to all the attendees, which was pretty sweet, and it was overall very interesting.

  8. On Saturday November 16th, I attended the leadership seminar and workshop. This was an event in which we were taught how to be leaders in different ways. I had intentionally only signed up for this seminar in order to fill the criteria of this assignment, I didn’t want to get up that early on Saturday but obviously I had to. I entered with my coffee and overall it was a dull Saturday morning. Though once the seminar started I was slowly becoming more and more interested in the seminar I had chosen. He spoke about two different types of leadership roles, each had their own purpose, but each going about things in a different manner. There was the creative leadership role, which was a way of leading that allowed your team more creative freedom over what was going on. You let them decide how things were going to roll through discussions and voting. But then there was the more direct and forceful leadership role. This is where you have everything planned already and you tell your team exactly what’s going to happen and what’s going to be done. This role is the most efficient in terms of time management, but this isn’t the role that maybe most efficient in terms of results. This seminar and workshop allowed us to experience these different ways of leadership. And this is something I feel as though I can apply to the computer science field. Sometimes you must lay things out for a team of programmers and other times you might have to let them go on their own with the task and see what they come up with. Overall, I think this was a helpful experience and I would attend something like this again.

  9. I attended the leadership academy seminar this past weekend. Before going to the conference I was kind of nervous because I did not attend it with anyone and went alone. I thought that it would just be like any other conference where we sit and talk about the topic and give examples with maybe an activity or two. When I got there I was a bit lost at first but I sat down at a random table and the other students were welcoming and kind and all round fun to talk to and be around. During the seminar we learned about the importance of leadership and the different types of leadership. We learned when it was appropriate to use what type of leadership and how to best help and encourage your team to move forward with the task. We were also given activities to do which were fun and insightful. We had to go and find something around the MTCC and find a way it could be used by the students. I also learned just how important it is to lead in a certain way and which type of leadership to use with you team. I would definitely attend another one of these seminars because it was super fun, the people were all really kind and I learned a lot about not only leading but the university itself.

  10. To be completely honest, I only chose to attend this event because it was taking place at Illinois Tech. I was expecting it to be some dumb seminar that would just tell us the same things everyone says for 4 hours and then I’d be out of there. However, that’s not how it ended up being. We learned about the difference between transactional and creative leaders. Transactional leaders are more authoritative to an extent and would usually be found in settings where the employees don’t do anything other than a few set tasks. Creative leaders usually follow more of a team or collectivist approach. They hear out all of their team members and usually come to a decision together rather than delegating tasks with an iron fist. They are most often found in higher paying jobs such as within the CS industry where they all work as a team to come up with a solution to any given problem. The seminar went surprisingly better than I expected. I was planning on leaving in the middle of it but ended up staying through the whole thing since it was so beneficial. The seminar made me consider applying for the leadership academy in the future. I would definitely try to attend more leadership academy seminars or things like it in the future.

  11. Going into the event I had expected it to be a panel of experts just having a discussion about leadership. This method is informative however the message doesn’t always stick with students. Thankfully this event was quite the opposite, it was very hands on and interactive. The first thing I learned at the event was the importance of communication as well as how to effectively communicate my ideas. The great thing about this skill is that is can be heavily applied to computer science. When doing group coding (using things like github) its 100% essential to be able to get your reasoning and logic across in a respectful and understandable manner. Another skill that was taught and practiced at this event was leadership. I volunteered to be the leader of the group for one of the tasks and realized its not as easy as it seems. Distributing a fair amount of work to each member, keeping people on task, and planning is not a simple task. At first it was a mess but it got progressively better as I learned. A skill like this is also essential in computer science because working in a group requires someone to take charge and tell who to code what and establish due dates in order for the project to get completed in a timely manner. Overall the event was enjoyable and the food was delightful so I am definitely considering attending the next one.

  12. I went into this seminar not sure what to expect. I was fairly certain I would be able to take something away from it since the topic is more general than others. The one part that I was sure on was that it was going to be over four hours. Applying this seminar to computer science directly would be difficult, but the skills we learned can be applied to working in groups on computer science related projects. This seminar was mostly students working with each other in small groups and then coming together to see what we found. I was able to apply some information I learned in other classes to the seminar. Especially during the first part where we were talking about creative teams. I feel that attending activities similar to this seminar will built more technical leadership in me. I might choose to attend more of the leadership academy’s seminars since I was able to take away a few things from this one. I enjoyed meeting new people as well as seeing familiar faces. This seminar defined creative teams and showed us how we could be more active leaders. I do disagree with saying creative teams are the best teams because not all leader/follower groups will be best managed this way. For example, if we are looking at a manager at a fast food business. It is a lot less important to reach a consensus among employees before doing an action. The manager needs to make swift decisions for the team even if the team doesn’t want this decision to be made.

  13. I’ve never been to a leadership academy at any time in my life, so I had neither good nor bad expectations for this event. I didn’t know almost anyone there, so I just sat down at a random table and waited for the seminar to begin. Though opening with an analysis of the “OK boomer,” did make me die inside a little, the rest of the event was quite informative and interesting on the topic of leadership styles and working smoothly with teammates. I was introduced to the differences between transactional leadership and creative leadership, and was able to practice these new ideas in conjunction with the people at my table. It was an interesting exercise in working with strangers under time constraints, and seeing how creative and transactional styles contrast and mix with each other in the real world. The former approach relies on encouraging teammates to be invested in the product they are creating, and intentionally pushing for unconventional approaches that can result in improvements/entirely new innovations. Transactional approaches, while not having the pizzazz of “creativity,” relies more heavily on a team leader creating a solid set of rules and distributing work fairly, which produces reliable and predictable results. Being part of these exercises showed me that these ideas can be helpful to increasing a team’s productivity and well-being, and will be kept in mind when I join a team in any field, whether that be CS or something else. I wouldn’t mind attending another one of these sessions.

  14. Going into this event, I expected this to be like any other event that has the term team building in it. In some cases I was right but it did have more than I expected. Like I expected, there was some person we assume to be a great leader who (like every single speaker) wasn’t always a great leader teaches us something we didn’t know before. Coming out of highschool attending ROTC, I already knew what was going to be said before the topic even came up on the screen. What really made this event stand out to me was that there was more. It may have started with the same cliche speech that I am accustomed to, the real magic came from the group activities. I was flooded with ideas from people that had completely different thought processes. Robotics taught me that there are people that think differently for sure, but at the end of the day we all were aiming to be engineers – so we thought like them. This event made me see a different perspective from a mathematician, an architect, a musician, and multiple cs students. The event was much less guided and we had more freedom to do as we like and actually form a team rather than just a group of people allocated to the same task. It really showed me the reason why I picked up this major. There is much more creativity involved in solving a problem and other people may seem different things that may be a problem and things to consider. You may end up with the same function, but there are multiple ways going about it. Its the different thought processes coming together to finish a task that really changed my opinions about the event. I will definitely attend this event again just to see how i can alter my way of thinking and actually implement what I have learned from ROTC and other various leadership talks.

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