Intern Innovation Project and LPC

Working with people remotely, is quite difficult to keep everyone on the same page.  At the beginning of our Innovation project, it was easy. We planned to come up with three ideas before our initial presentation to our business mentor and have her help us narrow them down. It was simple to use transformational leadership to get group members inspired about a few ideas. We all rallied behind the three ideas and worked towards the common goal of creating a presentation. With the help of the woman our business mentor sent in her place, we decided on one idea to pursue. However, the idea that we chose ended up being very similar to a project that ALSAC already in the works. Our group in Miami had been working hard on mockups of app ideas, research, etc. so when we ran into this difficulty, it became a struggle to keep the people in Miami on the same page. Instead of focusing on transformational leadership, focusing on dyadic relationships became more beneficial. Instead of rallying the group as a whole, it was more important to create individual relationships and reach out to people individually to solve the issue. I reached out to the prominent leader of our Miami half of the team in order to make sure she was not upset with the other leader at NEO and to inform her of why we need to move forward with a slightly different approach to our idea.

While I’m sure this was beneficial, I know that I need someone in my group to step up as a task oriented leader, because I am struggling with the big picture of the project now that we have to back track. Our group situation has become less than ideal and we have low LPC right now. I think of myself as more of a relationship oriented leader and from our class discussions about LPC, I believe that a task oriented leader would be more beneficial and help us get back on track.