Jacob SL3

• Chapter 8: What is emotional intelligence (EI)?  In what ways are you strongest in EI?  How do you get EI "smarter"?

Emotional intelligence is essentially all of your interpersonal skills combined.  My EI strong point would probably have to be empathy since whenever I'm angry or in an argument with someone I try to see the argument from their perspective and to understand why they are disagreeing or angry.

• Chapter 8: What is the coach's role in developing leadership capacity in the team?  A mentor's role?  A student's role?

The coaches role in developing leadership in a team is to demonstrate good leadership qualities (or at least improvements in them) and encourage students to learn about and develop these qualities.  A mentors role is similar to the coaches in that a mentor must demonstrate these qualities for the students as well.  A mentor however can help students develop their leadership ability a little more efficiently since there are simply more of them and they can spend more time with the students.  A students role is to learn leadership and other skills from the mentors and coach and then to try to implement the leadership tactics.

• Chapter 9: What are the satisfiers that get people to show up to robotics and exert at least minimum effort?  What are the specific motivators that push some students to work very hard for the team beyond simply being present?

I think one of the main satisfiers of our team is that you get to spend time being social.  If our team were to be all work all the time people would be less likely to volunteer to do it.  Another satisfier would be the fact that team members get to see the robot in action.  I know that on other teams this isn't a given due to transportation issues, but for our team at least it supplies a great goal to work towards.  As far as motivators go, personal recognition and a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the task really get people to work harder.

• Chapter 9: How much "hunger for excellence" do you think we have as a team?  In your view, are we shooting to be the best or trying to just be mediocre?

I think that our team is trying extremely hard to become excellent at everything.  We have been inspired by the change in performance from last year and we want to keep improving and make it farther in the competitions.  We really are trying to shoot for the best and, although I don't know when, as long as we put that energy to use in the right places we will accomplish a lot.  For instance we WILL go to St. Louis this year.

• Chapter 9: There is a list of summary bullet points on the last page.  Choose one that you think is most relevant to our team and talk about it.

Seek out best practices and implement them- Our team has already begun to implement this goal through this very activity and I believe this is because of its importance to our team.  Last year we had a large number of issues pop up due to laziness, inefficiency, lack of communication, and a bunch of other factors.  If we implement better practices and really make them work, we should be able to multiply our last years improvement greatly.

• Summary

In this final section of the book I learned about the way to encourage people to improve their leadership skills, the difference between satisfiers and motivators, and things such as the reasons to demand excellence.  All in all I think that this book had many great insights on how leadership should work and how to become a great leader.  In the overall course, I think the book I learned the most from and enjoyed the most was definitely the one on scrum, but I think that all of the books were relevant and useful to what we hope our team will be.