Engineering Reflective Journal: Teamwork and Leadership Analysis

This assignment is a reflective journal entry submitted by a student as part of their engineering coursework. The entry focuses on the student's experiences with teamwork and leadership, specifically within the context of group projects. The student reflects on the challenges of managing diverse team members, the importance of effective communication, and the use of strategies like open-ended discussions to foster collaboration and problem-solving. The reflection incorporates the 'deeper' levels of reflection as defined by Ullmann (2017), analyzing personal beliefs, identifying problems, and drawing lessons from the experience. The student highlights the significance of mutual trust and collaborative planning in achieving positive team outcomes and developing leadership skills. The assignment demonstrates the student's ability to analyze and improve team dynamics. This document is available on Desklib, a platform providing students with AI-powered study tools, past papers, and solved assignments.

Running head: REFLECTION
REFLECTION
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1REFLECTION
Journal 1
Reflection on effective team membership and leadership:
On critically reflecting upon my academic experience, I believe that I have acquired ample
exposure and experience with regard to team membership and leadership. As a part of pursuing
the Engineering majors degree, I had got the opportunity to be a part of multiple teams while
completing group assessments. In particular, I remember completing a group project during the
previous semester where I was elected as the group leader. As a group leader, it has been
tremendously difficult to manage a team efficiently as the five team members that I had in my
team, apart from me were extremely different from one another and had diverse personality types
and perception. As a leader, I found it extremely challenging to obtain uniform opinion of the
team members about different subjects. As a result of this, the team dynamics slowed down. In
order to overcome the existing crisis, I made use of personal reflection for developing effective
team-building strategies. I started with the use of ‘know your team-member’ session and then
proceeded to make use of open-ended discussions in order to come to an effective conclusion
that was agreed upon by the team members. The use of open-ended communications helped in
fostering brainstorming sessions that helped the team come up with many opportunities and
solutions to a project problem. Moreover, it also strengthened team bonding between the
different team partners and that in turn helped to foster effective team dynamics and positive
team outcomes. The overall experience helped me understand that what mattered the most while
leading a team of different personality types was a channel of effective communication that
helped unite the different team members. Overall, applying the deeper thinking level prescribed
by Ullman (2017), the experience helped me develop effective leadership skills and also skilled
my expertise to handle a team with diverse personality types. I also learnt that the best team work

2REFLECTION
and related outcomes were mostly associated with the cultivation of mutual trust and
collaborative team planning between team members.

3REFLECTION
References:
Ullmann, T. D. (2017, March). Reflective writing analytics: empirically determined keywords of
written reflection. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Learning Analytics & Knowledge
Conference (pp. 163-167).