This blog will be a retrospective on the 10-day trek, what I learned and what I will take into my life in the front country. Over the course of the 10 days, the group had many ups and downs and I had many personal ups and downs. Everything from the physical difficulty of the trek to the mental difficulties of navigating a nine student four instructor team over 10 days in the wilderness. Through these difficulties, a several teachings emerged: I became better at working in groups, giving feedback (more work needed), and working environments with complex emotions.
As someone who studies computer science at college, I haven’t had many opportunities to work in teams. I only had one or two classes that actually had any semblance of group work while the rest considered any collaboration plagiarism, and enough evidence for a failing grade in the course. This course has done a good job supplementing my degree where it was lacking in terms of teamwork. One of the first things we did when we got here was to play collaborative games where we needed to work as team to solve puzzles/ problems. That taught me a lot, but so did the 10-day trek. Everyday, the team had to worry about water, shelter, where to establish the bathroom, and getting along with each other. And everyday, it required teamwork and collaboration to establish and maintain these things. Through these daily rituals, I’ve learned how to be a more effective communicator and better at working in groups overall!
The trek also taught me that effective leadership heavily relies on being able to observe a situation and give feedback on it/ those around you. Feedback was a focus of trek and of course overall, but was especially important during the trek. Almost every night during our daily team reflection, the leaders of the day would open the floor for feedback. Many of these days, the group was silent. However, as time progressed, I began to realize that being more upfront with feedback could have been very beneficial for the group. Having a healthy discussion about how certain actions impact us early on could have made for a better overall team. Instead, the team was quiet during these open feedback times and we waited until one of the last days when the instructors told us we had to give feedback to actually give each other what we were thinking. And even after they gave us time to think and write feedback for each person, some people didn’t even do that. And in a course where the feedback is an integral part of personal growth, I felt it was rude and inconsiderate to not make more of an effort. All that to say, feedback is a great tool for growth, both as a team and as an individual, and I certainly saw that play out during the trek.
Another thing I learned about myself during the trek is that I need to work on my observation skills. A large part of being a leader and feedback is observing other people’s behavior. When deciding if we should push further or take extra rest, it is necessary to both hear what others are saying but also observe the group to determine what they are actually feeling. And this applies to everything not just if we should push further. I often found that I wasn’t the most adept at this skill and if people said they wanted to push further, even if they did not have it in them, I would still want to push. By the end the trek, I’d like to think that I got a little better at observing the team’s needs, but I still know I need to put more energy and focus into that skill.
Moving forward and to become a better leader, I aspire to pay more attention to what people really want, ask more questions, and practice active followership anytime I’m not in a directly leadership role. I think the combination of these three things in both my everyday life and in the workplace will set me up for great success and make me a much more effective leader into the future.
There’s only two blog posts left! I’ll see you at the next one 🙂