Reflections

INTRODUCTION

The four-day residential has been a creative, interesting, and challenging experience. It definitely made me take advantage of my abilities but on the other hand clearly forced me to focus on my weaknesses (Drucker, 1999, p.189). In my opinion, inside a team, a disciplined person is the kind of character who seizes the opportunity to talk with other members of the team, to listen carefully to their views and to be mild enough to exchange ideas thoroughly, in order to overcome any kind of obstacles (1, www.emeraldinsight.com). Residential was a painstakingly learning process. It constituted an irreplaceable motive to indulge into self-regulation.

SELF AWARENESS - SELF MANAGEMENT

The road to success and effectiveness is defined by the knowledge of one's strong and weak aspects. A reliable way of learning about ourselves besides regrouping and reviewing our thoughts and ideas is the use of self evaluation process and appropriate techniques. The experience of the residential self-identification process was important for me to identify personal aspects and guidelines of behavior. When we arrived and the teams were announced to us, I got biased against my teammates (1, www.emeraldinsight.com) because of their lack of cooperation skills and creative proposals which could threaten the success of our business plan creation. As a result I adopted a totally wrong and inflexible approach (Cameron, Whetten, 2004, p.251) that made me seem completely reluctant to contribute to the first day assignment. Through this inflexible and somehow reluctant stance I soon realized that solving different problems depends on developing contacts and communicating with others. Friction is averted and success is achieved when you see all options and find the courage to clarify goals, to work on pressure and shape the team's strategy. Lack of cooperation, series of disagreements and quarrels do not lead to success either when it is about the presentation of a paper or about solving any kind of problem. During the preparation of the business plan I realized that the process got stuck and that someone had to take charge of the team in order to achieve the best result. Therefore I assigned them tasks, as a team shaper (Belbin, Appendix 1). Each one of us would deal with his own subject. The final outcome was disciplined team work and sober, efficient cooperation on time to present our business plan. As far as my tolerance and patience qualities are concerned I frankly admit that there is a lack of control on the stress that arises from taking decisions immediately within a few minutes (Gallway W.T., 2002, p.62). My weakness in managing people under stress circumstances (Gallway W.T., 2002, p.83) definitely constitutes a major setback that came up during the residential experience when it became clear that we should come up as a workshop team quickly with a complete business plan. Then I realized that I was not patient enough to put up with attitudes such as laziness and lack of interest in the cause of setting up a working business plan. That lack of patience made me grab the initiative to propose an appropriate subject as business plan and consequently to stir up the rest of the team (2, www.12manage.com) to start working hard, efficiently and above all on time. I managed to help my colleagues clarify our goal and define the strategy that we should implement (3, www.emeraldinsight.com) in order to turn our ideas into practical actions and solutions to the problems that would arise if our business plan started operating. To sum up I do not regard my self as a true team worker (Belbin, 1996, p. 71) with a typical and communicative team spirit but a creative and dynamic team shaper (Belbin, 1981, p. 68) that found the courage under pressure and stress in conditions which were never met before, like being isolated, with many assignments to hand in and a strict deadline for our business plan submission, to organize and lead my team to prepare a successful business plan.

TEAM WORKING

The residential programme was dominated by the atmosphere which prevails in real business environment, providing us a very useful simulation (Marklund J., Laguna M., 2004, p.101). In a word it is all about bringing into contact totally different people in terms of background, ideas, mentalities and habits. In order to achieve the best possible result in the presentation of our business plan you had to steer up people with potential personalities but lack of ability to take initiative (Margerison C., McCann D., 1995, pp 42-44) and make decisions quickly and effectively and on the other hand to ensure that