By Alisha Hadley, Angela Frawley, Karen McMurray & Luis Rodriguez
Reflection on Process
The Team E process to come to a consensus was collegial and reiterative. We discussed our understanding of the rankings and definitions of characteristics, and we actively reflected on the process as our results emerged. We analyzed whether our process was serving us to make the best decisions, a nod to demonstrating cooperative tendencies in our group. While we did not shift our methods, articulating it as we went was helpful for moving forward to complete the rankings.
Initially, we looked at consistencies within the extremes on the scale. We started by identifying where we had high- and low-ranked characteristics, and as we moved towards the middle of the rankings, we made choices between characteristics that we considered clustered with common themes or overlaps. For instance, we could see that forward-looking, inspiring and ambitious were likely speaking to the visionary nature of leadership, and therefore discussed which of these three would rank as most resonant to our group. One member noted this could become an exercise in semantics; however, we agreed upon the goal of creating diversity in our highest-ranked characteristics.
It was interesting to note that we agreed our independent rankings had changed post-readings, with one participant acknowledging that being visionary is more important to leadership than they understood when ranking before the readings, and another group member sharing embarrassment about how low they ranked honesty. They further explained that a personal leadership issue had influenced their low ranking at that time. Personal stories were shared in our process to come to conclusions and make meaning of the characteristics and their definitions. These contributed to understanding as well as group development and cohesion.
