3. Effectively balance leadership and followership to affect positive group functioning.

I am currently in Lead209, Presentation Strategies and all of our presentations were done within groups. The attached images show my grades for my past two presentations.

For these presentations we were randomly paired up with strangers, and then we were assigned to create an informational and a persuasive presentation that lasted about 18 minutes. My team had 6 members, including myself. 

In the beginning my team was very quiet, no one was talking to each other, not even about the upcoming presentations. I do not like to wait until the last minute to start working on something so I was getting anxious and kept reaching out to talk to everyone, but we could not really find an agreement as to when we would start working on this. The more I tried to talk to them, the last responsive they seemed to get. I did not want to get upset with them because I knew that this would be a team for the entire semester so I tried to follow along and see what they would do. 

We waited until the week before it was due, not by my choice but I could not force them to do anything being as they did not even know me, but once we met everything was so smooth. The most unexpecting member of the team was actually the most beneficial to the group's dynamic. He was very nonchalant and did not seem to care about embarrassing himself or anything, so we used that to our advantage and had him make our presentations more entertaining. We knocked out our entire presentation during this one meeting and it was better than I could have imagined. 

When it was time for our second presentation, we were all friends now. Not only did we talk about our work that was upcoming, but we also made jokes and socialized with each other. This presentation was much easier to make and was completed without any problems at all. 

I think the topic of this assignment fits into this story of my presentation team because it showed me that it is okay to do things differently sometimes. Not everyone will work the same way that I do, and that is okay. If I can trust my team to do what my team is meant to do, everything will go by much smoother. Although I was a little anxious at first, I had high hopes for them and did not get upset with them, because of this I did not hinder our growth, and we ended up becoming closer than just a team of strangers.