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A story about learning how to take on a leadership role in a group project during the COVID-19 pandemic. <\/p>\n"},"library":"H5P.AdvancedText 1.1","metadata":{"contentType":"Text","license":"U","title":"Untitled Text"},"subContentId":"9200b9cc-32fd-4d49-8b42-e3346191daf0"},"title":"Leading Teams in Pandemic Times by Fabian Castillo"},{"content":{"params":{"text":"

Everything started when I decided to give a spin to my career and end my finance and accounting job as cost accounting manager in my home country, to enroll in a hotel and restaurant management program to pursue my dream of managing my own restaurant. The first challenge was to move to Canada and start my program online, which was not that difficult, but the second challenge was on how to network and meet my classmates in a virtual environment and even more challenging how to deal with the assignments that were supposed to be done as teamwork with people I have never met before and that were probably in different time zones due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So when it happened to be the first assignment in teams for the Business of Tourism course, I decided to wait a week after the professor introduced the assignment so that the other team members would connect with each other and start discussing the topic, but that did not happen. <\/p>\n"},"library":"H5P.AdvancedText 1.1","metadata":{"contentType":"Text","license":"CC BY-NC-ND","title":"Untitled Text","authors":[{"name":"LKP99","role":"Author"}],"licenseVersion":"4.0"},"subContentId":"0c5c576c-6f51-4c30-a0ef-2f63843cbe7d"},"title":"The Wicked Problem"},{"content":{"params":{"text":"

After seeing that no one reached out to any of the team members, I decided to take the lead because I did not want to get a bad grade just because my team was not interested in doing the work, and for sure I was not going to do all the work for them, because that is not fair and it is not the right way to do things.<\/p>\n\n

Before reaching out to all the team members, I reviewed the assignment in detail, assigned roles and responsibilities to each member of the team, and set due dates to review the stages of our project on a weekly basis. In the end, this was great because assigning roles and responsibilities and due dates helped us as a team that never met in person and helped team members that were in faraway time zones. It also developed my leadership skills, which I considered useful for other team members because, for the next project, one of the members wanted to take the lead as I did in the first group project. <\/p>\n\n

Moving to a virtual world due to the pandemic was not that bad because it helped a lot of people develop some skills that were maybe never going to be discovered otherwise. In this case, it was managing and leading a team for a college project, but tomorrow it could be leading a team in a multinational company.<\/p>\n\n

I would recommend everyone experiencing a similar problem to take the lead of the assignment by organizing the team, assigning activities and due dates for the tasks required because after college in any company there will be situations in which we will need to work with people that probably don't like to work in teams. However, if one member assigned in a team can't complete the task on a certain due date, the whole team may be affected.<\/p>\n"},"library":"H5P.AdvancedText 1.1","metadata":{"contentType":"Text","license":"U","title":"Untitled Text"},"subContentId":"c0f7a0bc-688f-4d04-9f5b-2cae101d8bf6"},"title":"Finding a Solution"},{"content":{"params":{"text":"

I never expected to develop great leadership and other soft skills in a virtual world; however, the COVID-19 pandemic allowed me to do so.<\/p>\n"},"library":"H5P.AdvancedText 1.1","metadata":{"contentType":"Text","license":"U","title":"Untitled Text"},"subContentId":"19ba1052-93d5-401f-94a1-6f6b7e3ea19b"},"title":"Final Thoughts"},{"content":{"params":{"text":"

Castillo, F. (2021, October 26). Leading Teams in Pandemic Times<\/em>. Liberated Learners. <\/span>https:\/\/wicked.liberatedlearner.ca\/learner\/leading-teams-in-pandemic-times\/<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n"},"library":"H5P.AdvancedText 1.1","metadata":{"contentType":"Text","license":"U","title":"Untitled Text"},"subContentId":"cdc9cf94-0c6a-4cf4-88cf-8d5391406d9a"},"title":"APA Reference"}],"hTag":"h2"}

Leading Teams in Pandemic Times

Liam Peart