Key Event 3

WHAT?

At the beginning of the Fall 2010 semester, I began my job as a resident adviser.  Resident advisers are assigned a specific amount of residents for which they are independently responsible for on a daily basis.  Most other things done by RAs are done while working with your staff.  For me, that included working with 16 new people -- one of whom was my new supervisor-- in order to do my job.

SO WHAT?

When my staff initially met and started working together we perfectly followed the Stages of Group Development.  During our Fall training (the first few days we were there) ideas and thoughts on what the group should do fell strictly on the supervisor as the rest of us enjoyed small talk.  By the last day of training, Storming and norming had begun.  RA's began to test the boundaries of the rules with the supervisor, everyone learned what the 'strict' rules were and in what areas the supervisor was pretty lax.  After we learned the roles and procedures for being an RA, and learned the rules our supervisor would establish for us, we began to form social relationships.  Inadvertently, friendships formed among the staff members and subgroups formed that would interact outside of work hours.  Once the residents started arriving we were like the birds thrown out of the nest, you either jumped into Performing and started doing your job or you sank and needed help from the rest of the team.  After finishing checking in the residents at the beginning of the year we continued to work as healthy group.  Sadly, at the end of this year, we had to face the realities of the adjourning part of development since half our staff was graduating and would not be returning for another year of work in the next semester.

NOW WHAT?

Through this group I learned the basic stages of group development.  Of course, at the time, I did not recognize the specific terms.  However, with the concepts I learned from taking certain courses within the leadership minor curriculum, I can now identify how our group was formed, how it worked, and how it ultimately dissolved.  Learning the innate stages of group development was a key event in terms of my leadership education.  Instead of being a passive bystander in groups, I now know the information that allows me to actively help develop a successful group in any social, personal or professional setting.  This knowledge that I learned from being in this minor and the correlating skill that I have been able to hone while at Virginia Tech will most assuredly be, if not the most useful, then certainly the concept of leadership I will use most often after I leave Virginia Tech.