Individual Reflection On The New Venture Challenge
The new venture challenge was a very interesting activity, from the beginning I found it exciting. For many students this was the first opportunity to enter the business world. This project helped me to better understand the mechanisms behind businesses and how much a team with good skills is important. Since our first team meeting, in which we brainstormed to decide the product / service to sell, we understood that a good coordination between all the team members was necessary to achieve efficiency.
After this first meeting, I and Ville, one of my teammates, became the CEOs of our company, thanks to the leadership skills that we have shown to our teammates. We delegated then the tasks among the various members based on their skills and we helped them to understand what they had to do, and we motivated them to work and to not procrastinate their tasks. This was necessary since after the two of us took control of the situation, everything started to become easier and clearer for the whole team. We still had several problems with them, some members of the team did not contribute until we had a discussion where we referred to them as free-riders, another one didn’t change his behaviour till the end. From that moment the situation has improved, and the team has become more productive, each member was completing their tasks within the deadlines set by us and this has enabled our business to function perfectly. The products were sold out on the same day of the start of sales and we therefore had to contact again our supplier for new patches that we managed to sell even before they got delivered to us.
This experience allowed me to understand the role of groups and how it is necessary to have an coordination among the members. Sometimes this element is absent in the new teams, so it is necessary to create it, all together or by assigning this responsibility to a member or supervisor. Working in a team means sharing the skills, motivations and goals of a work group that must converge towards a goal to be achieved. Among the advantages of team work there is also the problem solving; the resolution of a problem is clearly simpler and faster, if faced by several individuals at the same time. Similarly, we can say that any burden of failure, or in any case of non-achievement of the objectives, is spread over all the members of the team, with a consequent lower psychological burden on individuals (such as anxiety and demotivation).
Furthermore, since I was a leader in my team, I realized that it is not enough to be a good coordinator to be a leader; rather, we must take the role of the motivator and of the one who, if necessary, is ready to work collaboratively. A leader must be a person available to listen, to confront and to dialogue in general.
