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From my belief, personal transformations are manifested from self-upgrade or acknowledgment through experiences, and joining the Interdisciplinary Communication Project course was one of my worthwhile opportunities. Throughout the project, playing different roles in an agency, I had chances to gain practical industrial knowledge, evaluate and figure out many points for improvement.
Me as A Project Leader
Although this was not the first time I signed my name as a Team Leader, it still was a tough challenge for me with many mental breakdowns within one semester. Nevertheless, this experience urged me to reflect several times on my leadership skills, and I knew that there are certain issues that I have to solve immediately as I want to lead a project to success.
Firstly, I learned about the significant importance of the leader’s responsibility in applying team discipline and providing honest criticism to keep the project on track. At the forming state, it was our very first shortcoming for not clearly defined team rules including sanctions for non-compliance. The reason behind that choice is that I and my teammates expected that we would have a harmonious working environment and give prominence to self-discipline. However, as we start working together in a busy course like ICP, the problem occurs when some members did not finish their tasks on the soft deadline. As a Leader, I should be well aware of permission available to me and be prepared to utilize some warnings and then punishments when some member's performance is disruptive enough to apply coercion correction (Menderlsohn 1998). Regrettably, I was not brave enough to give straightforward feedback on that problem because I was afraid of creating tense atmospheres, especially when working online and miscommunication is a potential risk. Thus, I only provide soft reminders and it leads to our team deadline’s procrastination and avoidable product incompletion when present to clients. Learning from this unpleasant experience, I start looking for effective tips to give constructive feedback and alerts other people from online sources: YouTube Video & Linkedin Courses. From what I read, the feedback must focus on developing and strengthening a person with opportunities to change instead of tearing him or her down with faults (Forbes 2017). As soon as I realize that, I practice giving honest feedback and recommendations simultaneously and gain better reactions from my teammates.
Figure 1. The secret to giving great feedback. Reproduced from Youtube 2020
Figure 2. My ‘Improving your Leadership Communication’ Course Certificate, Reproduced from LinkedIn 2021
Secondly, the project also taught me a lot about virtual meetings. According to Anantatmula (2010), an excellent leader convinces members of the demand to transform, motivate new mindset to accomplish common goals even in challenging situations. In my case, COVID 19 condition is a difficult work environment. As we have to work online, virtual meetings are inevitable. At first, silence among meetings happens usually and became a barrier for my team to communicate and collaborate effectively. Recognizing the problem and desiring to push up the team atmosphere, I research ways to reverse these silent meetings. Be a facilitator, I regularly spend time check-in on every topic to guarantee everybody is on the same page with questions like “Is this understandable?” “Are you ok with this idea?”. With members who stay silent for a while, I actively call them by name and ask about their opinion. These strategies have boosted up my team’s meeting that everyone is participating in the conversation. Moreover, to improve my leadership communication, I also joined a LinkedIn Learning course related to this topic in my free time.
Me as A Idea Creator
Idea generation is progress for the team to create potential solutions, decisions, and hypotheses usually happened in the brain-storming stage (Osborn 1957). At first, this paradigm started off slowly to my team, we only produced a few qualified ideas after a long meeting. The explanation for this productivity loss is that individuals are unwilling to raise some ideas because we are afraid of being criticized early or repeating other’s ideas (Karau & William 1993). Therefore, I recommended my team apply the new technique of “brainwriting”. Instead of waiting to take turns speaking up about our idea, we prepared and wrote down individual ideas to stimulate as many ideas as possible. Many studies suggest that during the ideation process, participants should be inspired to come up with unusual thoughts and they should combine to develop the original idea (Paulus & Yang 2000). Therefore after brainstorming individually, we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each idea, combine them into the final Unstoppable Journey concept. Specifically, the tram was taken from my Endless Journey idea, the infinity rail was Thao’s inspiration and the sentimental value of the key message was adopted from Khanh’s Homecoming concept. To develop my concept generating ability, since this semester was a dynamic one and I could not finish my plan at week 4 is to watch and analyze 2 creative works per day, I followed several pages on social media that provided creative or communication-related content like Advertising Vietnam, RGB, iDesign, etc. to passively learn from cool projects when entertaining.
Me as a Web Designer
Since Designing was not a strength for my team, we have to support each other to meet the assignment requirements. When Tu and Hoang focused on editing the promotion video, I decided to take charge of the group website. Although having some experience with web design before, until this time I actually approached 7 Factors that Influence User Experiences and utilized it in developing the website flow. Designing the team website also provokes me to learn more about Designing Rules by consuming Youtube videos. This knowledge is really helpful now when I innovate my website from the Making Media Course. It is much easier for me to recognize many basic design faults like spacing, typography, and color picking. In addition, when attending the ICP’s personal branding session, I became even more conscious about the benefit of appealing design in impressing employers. As I want to leverage my work’s visuals in the future, in the upcoming sembreak I will spend time discovering design thinking courses from LinkedIn Learning.
Figure 3. Some courses that I am planning to take this sembreak. Reproduced from Linkedin Learning 2021.
Overall, learning the ICP course has awakened me to many areas that need improvement as I want to step into the agency industry and reach my career goals to become a Creative Director. As I promised before, I kept updating my LinkedIn profiles and currently seeking an internship in an agency for more real-life experiences.
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