StOmP!

The last activity we did was a rendition of stomp. The instructions weren't very specific but we were told that we could use our hands, mouths, and feet to create a rhythm of some sort. Honestly I felt very uncomfortable with this activity because I'm more used to activities with a specific set of rules, not something that's abstract like this activity. Although I play piano and guitar (which has the sheet music and notes as governing rules) I still didn't feel comfortable incorporating beats with rhythms in the group. I mostly sat back and did what I was told because I felt kind of confused about the whole activity. I wanted the activity leaders to be more specific and tell us more of what we should do but I guess it was a good example of how managers in business should lead the self- directed work teams. Give them instruction and let them alone to enhance creativity and individuality. Anyways, in the end my group's performance turned out much better than I thought it was going to be. We didn't really concentrate on the choreography so much until the end, but that gave us more time to make the beat sound good. I was pretty worried about how it was going to turn out in front of the class but in the end it worked out flawlessly. This is a good example of social facilitation. We all pretty much had each of our roles figured out and knowing the crowds expectations, we performed much better than we did by ourselves.
Although the end product turned out ok, I felt like we didn't come together very well in creating the 'stomp'. It was more like everyone had a bunch of different ideas and spoke louder than the next person to get it across. The main thing that stood out to me was the fact that we all want to be good leaders and lead each other. This causes conflict, I think because we don't want to be lead, but we want to lead. No one in our class really wants to be a follower (Duh b/c it's a leadership program) but I think this caused conflict in our last activity where as it could have run much smoother. I just think that we all are so eager to lead that even though any of these activities might not be our expertise, we're trying to step up anyways. This is good and bad. We all want to develop our leadership skills but are so concerned with this that in the future we might not recognize when to take a step back.
Coming back to lessons from the Managing teams book, our purpose was to create a beat using only our hands, mouths, and feet. Our place was in Marston gym. Our power was given to us by the leaders of the activities pretty much leaving the whole process up to us. Our plan was also left up to the individual teams to decide. Finally the people were numbered off into groups and therefore were random.
Even though this wasn't the smoothest project, we made it through the frustrations and performed well.