Regulating Individuals

Working in groups can pose many challenges, one challenge involves keeping everyone on track and working together. In order to overcome this challenge it is important to regulate the individual members of a team along with regulating the team’s spirit. Regulating individual team members is not done by yelling at them and angrily pointing out everything they are doing wrong. The importance of regulating individuals is that is has to be approached in a calm and professional manner. Many times the hard part about this is that no one in a group has the guts to speak up and call someone out for doing something wrong, doing that sounds scary because it may make working in the group awkward for awhile. There is a way to effectively regulate individuals and it is broken down into 3 simple tips:

Address the issue internally:

his simply means that before you bring up a problem with a group members make sure you know what you are angry about in the first place. This is important because it allows you time to think before you speak, and you can focus on the issue you want to address and not get sidetracked with other problems you may have. 

Address the member individually:

This simply means you need to pull the person you are having a problem with to the side and discuss it, do not discuss it in front of everyone. Do not bring up a problem you have with an individual in front of a group of people they may feel like you are ganging up on them and the result would not be good, they would most likely shut down and refuse to participate due to the sheer embarassment of being called out in front of everyone.

Use iMessages:

This means that you need to explain to the person that what they are doing is also effecting you. Make it clear by using phrases like “ I feel________when you do _______” by doing this the other person may feel empathy and want to change because they are now aware of how their behavior is affecting you. Do not just simply state what it is that you don’t like because they may just get defensive, and they conversation will go no where.

Aspects of a Team

The three system variables are input, process, and output. 
Input is where all the members of the group have different strengths and talents that can benefit the team in some way. 
Process is how the team deals with conflict and how they use everyone’s ideas, and output is the outcome or conclusion of the team’s efforts. The process is also the stage in which more learning and growth will take place. If a team can overcome and work out their problems, they are more successful than a team who bitterly gets through their projects. 
Output is the group's final product. In this stage you must figure out how to solve the problem and what you can learn from the journey.

As far as the process goes, one specific thing that’ll most likely remain with me for the rest of my life was this in-class activity that dealt with marbles. The objective of the activity was to get a series of marbles across 3 blocks of wood. As a group we pretty much found a solution right away; 4 of us held the wood in place mid-air while the 5th person dropped the marbles down the wood. 

Yes this solution did work, however our instructor was adamant about us continuing and finding another. We did just that as we took another 5 minutes of pure brainstorming. This resulted in us holding the wood against the wall, once again the marbles flowed down the wood, but this time it was better! The point that I personally got from this activity was that the first solution isn’t always the best, trial and error is okay and completely acceptable.

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Regulating Team Spirit

Regulating team spirit identifies the importance of keeping a team motivated, it is easy to be excited to work with a team in the beginning, but a lot of motivation can be lost as you continually work with them. There are three steps that can help keep the team motivation high and they are:
1: Don’t stop dating your team
The concept here identifies that it is important to keep group meetings exciting. You need to keep that spark alive, this can be done by changing the places where you meet with your groups, do other things not involving schoolwork with your groupmates. If you get to know your teammates on a more personal level you may be more inclined to want to meet up and work with them. 
2: Don’t let there be static
Stay in tuned, let your teammates know what is going on in your life. If you having other things going on that may be affecting your performance in your group, let your teammates know. They will be more understanding if you explain what is going on instead of not saying anything at all.
3: Check yourself before you wreck yourself
The concept here is that you need to be able to control your emotions. Do not let one small thing ruin your day, and don’t transfer your frustration onto your teammates. If you let your emotions get the best of you it will most likely show through your work and performance, and it will affect the whole team as well.  

Mission Statement

Creating a mission statement means creating something that you wish to live by. You identify something you wish to do and create a statement that explains why you want to do this. Creating a personal mission statement is the first step before creating a team mission statement. Once all team members have identified their own personal mission statements it is then easier to combine them into one powerful mission statement that combines the important concepts from each individuals mission statement. Here is an example of a group mission statement:

“Create a positive environment absent of fear, where every individual can gain advanced knowledge and skills, take risks and be themselves without judgement.”

Motivation

The third step for being an emotionally intelligent leader is motivation. 

Motivated people enjoy creative challenges. 

They also like to make goals and finish them in a timely fashion. They usually have lots of energy and are very passionate, and show commitment, but are often bored with simple tasks. Emotional intelligent people with high levels of motivation are usually very optimistic. When self-regulation meets motivation, it’s very easy for one to overcome frustration and depression.

Empathy

Understanding empathy as a leader is a lot different than the empathy experienced on a day to day basis. As a leader you do not need to try to take on other people’s emotions and try to please them. It instead refers to you understanding other people’s feelings, and other factors when it comes to making a decision that will affect them. 

A leader can not think about themselves when making decisions that concerns others, it is important to empathize with the employees because what affects them also affects the leader. The reasons for why empathy in a leader is so important is because of the increasing use of teams, the rapid pace of globalization, and the growing need to retain talent.

A team relies on a leader to make the important decisions, however this can’t be done without input from all group members. In order to reach a consensus a leader needs to be able to understand the viewpoints of all the people involved in the group. The rapid pace of globalization identifies another reason why empathy is so important, globalization creates room for misunderstandings. These misunderstandings can be due to differences in languages and cultures, a leader needs to be able to empathize and understand that everyone is different and that there can be more than one way to do something. Finally the need to retain talent is another reason why empathy is important for a leader to have. Leaders want to keep the good people around, but instead of trying hard to keep them around it is more logical to teach everyone to be a certain way. Some ways to go about this is through mentors and coaches, they would provide a push that people need to keep their work performance up or help them improve it.

Self Regulating

If you’re having trouble with Self-regulation remember that you are in control of you. 

Self-regulation refers to the ability to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods within yourself. 

Self-regulation is like an ongoing conversation that frees us from being prisoners of our feelings. A person who is effective in self-regulation aren’t absent of feelings or bad moods, just like the average person, but they are skilled in controlling impulses and may even channel these feelings to make them beneficial. 

Self-regulation is a component of leadership that advocates leading by example. In group work each person plays an equal role; your group members will depend on you to fulfill that role. Trustworthiness and integrity are very important to self-regulation. If each member regulates others (see “regulating others” section) and themselves everyone would be disciplined, dedicated, and on-point in group objectives.