Most of us are knee deep in our leadership essays due later tonight. The goal of the exercise is to “explore group dynamics” within our study groups. Now exploring group dynamics after 2 months in the group is not necessarily rocket science; however, the real challenge is becoming mindful and trying to understand why we behave in different ways within groups or as our Prof. Ben Bryant and our leadership coaches would phrase it “dig deeper”!
Thanks to the leadership experiential we were able to start this exploration and identify not just our conscious actions within the group but also our unconscious actions and let me tell you – the unconscious is not pretty J so recollecting and documenting (sometimes painful) stories of all the fish we fried in the mountains (aka leadership experiential) can be quite an intense experience for many of us. It is also one of the reasons I put away the task until this weekend.
Having spent the past 48 hours writing this paper, I’m slowly beginning to see the value and power of this self-reflection exercise. Leadership is not simply about managing people and how you portray yourself but is a lot about how people perceive your actions and the way you behave. So imagine if you could study why you unconsciously do certain things and the impact these actions have on other people – you could in effect start becoming more aware and mindful of everyday situations and be able to tell why people react to you in different ways. This is why this exercise is so much more powerful than reading texts or following lectures about leadership….in this exercise we are the subjects, we are the case and indeed we are the teachers and students as well!
Until next time……
Vikas Menon
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