Reflective entry by Yuchen

My role as a coachee:

This week’s coaching session was really helpful to me. After talking about my “terrible experience” with a mal-functional team, my coach helped me realize that during team building process, communication and inspection are both important. He demonstrated this with an example of scientists and engineers who collaborate to complete a task. As the scientists need to plan for the project, they also need to communicate with engineers and make sure that the engineers understand the purpose of the process they designed in order for better participation of all members. An important lesson I learnt from this story is that each member, no matter what his role is, must understand the goal of the team so that they won’t feel that they don’t belong to it.

In my team, what happened was that the new member of the team might feel she was “the third wheel of a bicycle”. With the help of my coach, I realized that it’s important for team leader to periodically inspect the commitment of his team members and ask about their opinion. As a result, team members, including the new comers would be encouraged sharing their opinions without being afraid of break the harmony within the team, and therefore they would participate and engage themselves more to the team activities.

In addition, I realized that on the other hand, it was her (new comer’s) responsibility as well to be more proactive. All of us should make extra efforts to “rock the boat” since the problem won’t come out themselves and the team building processes won’t flow without intervention.

My role as a coach:

For another time, I was really inspired by how Awa talked about the skillful leader that she had worked with. She had briefly mentioned this leader in the session of last week. I had a sense that she was really impressed and convinced by the leader. However, to my surprise, she told me that this manager wasn’t a charismatic leader and it’s not the manager’s personality that made him an admirable leader. She explained that the manager was actually a successor of a very popular manager who intended to influence his subordinates by building personal relationship and turning this into his own personal assets. However, the new manager conducted a very different way. Although he has kept suitable distance with his subordinates, he made them feel that he was accessible and he would listen to their opinions. In addition, he used very creative way to organize the meetings. In short, the manager has demonstrated that he had the competency in commutation and management so that his subordinates would follow him.