Saber Simulation
In the first day of the simulation, I learnt that when thrown into the water, I don't get nervous. Rather, I am happy to take a challenge and trying to do the best I can. Since I had no prior background in HR – I have deliberately decided to take this role. When we were asked to choose the logo for the company, after some negotiations the team agreed to take my choice. I learnt that I can convince people follow my ideas. As the VP of HR, I needed to work and coordinate with all other team members since my decisions relied on their inputs. In some cases, I challenged the number of workers or the incentives amount that other team member asked. I always gave reasoning and explained why I think differently. I think that the problem in our first simulation day was that we didn't set a strategy or direction. As mentioned in class, setting strategy is an important leadership behavior that in this case we failed to follow. Everyone tried to concentrate in their own department and figure out by themselves what they should do, without really sharing their insights with the other team members. This behavior correlates to the students assembling radio-transistors, mentioned in "The science of Team Success". As described in the example, we could have done better if we had worked together as a group, instead of working alone.
In addition, this has come to extreme when we needed to choose the market we were going to expand, and all team members including myself adopted the decision of one specific team member without looking at the analysis and examining the data. We failed to choose the right market to enter because of that. In addition, we were lack of time so everyone in the team got into the "Abilene Paradox" and self-censorshiped themselves as described in "When Team Mates Raise The white Flag" in order to get the job done in the defined timelines.
Every team member chose his own method of analyzing the data. For people that have finance background, it was trivial