What do you see as your strengths as a team leader/member?
As a team leader To start with, I think one of my strengths to be a team leader is I can communicate with my team member well and build relationships with my team member. It is necessary for a leader has effective communication skills and builds a good relationship with team members, which make leader effective lead his/her team to accomplish a common goal. Effective communication is a key to building relationship with others. Therefore, as a leader should have an effective communication skill. According to Varner & Beamer (2011), “Knowing how to communicate is very necessary., Successful communication usually contains the revelation of some benefit for the party being persuaded (Varner & Beamer, 2011, p.192). Otherwise, a good communication will avoid misunderstanding and conflict within a team. For example, I had a team project in Organization Behavior course. One of team member always complained about other two members, which makes our team ineffective and productivity is down. I communicated with them in private and found out the problems. I think I display a bridge to connect them together and solve problems. Finally, our team did a very good job in our team project.
Moreover, I think my second strength to be a team leader is I can find and solve the problem timely. Problem solving is an essential skill for all leaders. In a team, it is natural has problems and conflicts. As a leader, he/she should pay attention to these kinds of issues. If a leader ignores problems, it will affect the team performance and cause a big trouble in the team. Thus, a leader should have ability to observe and find problems. In addition, the leader should also have ability to provide right solutions to solve problems. Like the previous example I mentioned before, I find they complained about each other and affected our team performance. I think the problem is they are the lake of communication that causes misunderstanding. In order to solve this problem, I communicated with my team member private and helped them communicate effectively.
Last but not least, my third strength as a team leader is I am open mind and empower team member. Empower team member can make team member have a sense of accomplishment and feels valued. As a leader, empower team member is a way to keep team member hold a positive attitude and responsibility to do their work. “Cooperation teamwork succeed best when employees are empowered to take responsibility for their work and to participate in oversight and guidance to keep everything in focus.” (Fuller 1998) I empower them shows I trust they have ability and makes them feel valued.
As a team member
I think my first strength as a team member is responsible for my individual task with high quality. In a team, it is a very common separated task to individual. I believe that a person should responsible for their task. If a person doesn’t responsible for their individual task, the team performance will tend to down. I do believe that I can finish my job timely with high quality. For example, in this team project, I got a job to design the project house and our team PowerPoint slides and record our team Agenda & minutes. When I got this job, I began to do the research and finish my job on time with high quality. I think that an effective member should responsible for their work, and finish them timely and successfully.
In addition, my second strength as a member, I think, is that I can have a good relationship with the leader and other team members. The relationships between leader and member or member and member are very important. If all team members can get along with each other harmoniously, they can finish their jobs with high quality quickly because they have the supports timely. Therefore, the team will achieve its goals easily and successfully. Moreover, people like to live in a harmonious environment. In the harmonious environment, people will get the motivations and influences, which are good for them to work. Therefore, the good relationship is necessary for a team.
Moreover, I am respecting others and learning from others. A team is a group of people works together to accomplish a shared goal. Each team member has different personality and abilities. I think as a team member should adapt the difference within a team and understand the difference between team members. Respecting others is a function of a team to work together. As a team member, if we do not respect others, that would cause problems and affect the work environment. I do believe that I respect others; I can get an estimation from others. Additionally, each of team members is unique, they have special skills that I did not have. As a team member, I have an opportunity to learning new skills from others.

What areas do you still need to work on? Why? And how will you go about improving on this area?
After taking the course of Leading Teams, I find that I have some areas I still need to work on. They are my weaknesses. The first weakness is introverted. I do not afraid of communicate with others. But when I talk with people whom I do not familiar with, I always feel shy, uncomfortable. This characteristic also reflected in the result of Jung’s personality test, the result of my personality type is “INFJ”. In this result, which shows I am an introvert person. , I do not like to express the emotional feeling with others, especially in the first meeting the person who I meet first. Therefore, others will think I do not like share information and hard to communicate.
Additionally, I think I am easy to be influenced by feeling. For instance, if I were a team leader, when facing difficulties, I was easy to have bad moods, and these bad moods would affect me to make decisions. Also, I think I also afraid to face conflict. When our team has conflict, I tend to uncomfortable and try to solve this conflict as soon as possible.

What has been your key takeaway or primary lesson learned that you could bring into your professional environment and apply to your own workplace initiatives or endeavors?
There are two primary lessons I learned form the course that I could bring into my professional environment in the future.
The first primary lesson uses the right motivation approach to motivating employees or team members. Leaders should know how to motivate their team members correctly in different situations. According to Bell and Smith (2010), there are eight different ways to motivate team members: money, social needs, self-image, expectancy, equity, appreciation, theory X and theory Y principles, and the Hawthorne effect. From my perspective, most leaders like to use money, social needs, and expectancy to motivate team members. For example, motivation by money is a very common way in the business groups, especially at the low level. In addition, in this level, leaders like to use money as the rewards to motivate their members to work harder. For example, one summer, I did an internship in my father's company. Actually, I was a labor because I was new, and the salary was connected to how much I did, just like others. There was a rank about the work. The top five could get the rewards. I remembered the director told the person, who is the number one, if he could keep his ranking position for two months, he would get trouble rewards. Therefore, he became more actively, and two months later, he got the trouble rewards. All in all, motivated by money is a way to motivate team members. This approach cannot be used for all situations. An effective leader should know how to use the correct method to motivate their team members so that their members can create profits for the team, and the team will succeed.
The second lesson I want to point out knows the importance of emotional intelligence. After read the eBook named Making Teams Stick Together. I know a high emotional intelligence can influence a person’s leadership style and also can avoid some problems. Emotional intelligence defined as the ability to understanding and manages our emotions and those around us (Fletcher, 2012). This quality can give me a variety of skills, such as the ability to manage relationships with leaders and members, navigate social networks. In our final team project of this course, we always had met. So the conflicts between leaders and members could not be avoided. Every member provided his or her ideas. Our team leader did the best job the coordinate members’ emotions and ideas. He explained to us why he wanted to use this idea but give up another idea. With the high emotional intelligence, our team leader dealt with the different opinions and provided the solutions to solve problems. What’s more, he also handled the relationship between leaders and members. Therefore, from my point of view, emotional intelligence plays a vital role in business. Additionally, possessing high emotional intelligence can make my future career be flatter.
To sum up, there are some other lessons I learned in this course, and I share two primary lessons, which I think can bring into my professional environment and apply to my workplace in the future. These two primary lessons use the right approach to motivating employees and the importance of emotional intelligence.

Reference
Abudi, G. (2010). The five stages of team development: A case study. Project Smart Co. UK.

Bell, A. H., & Smith, D. M. (2010). Learning team skill (2nd edition). New Jersey Columbus, OH: Prentice Hall.

Butt, J. (27 February 2005). Introverted sensing thinking judging. Typelogic. Retrieved from: http://www.typelogic.com/istj.html

Varner, I. &Beamer, L. (2011). Intercultural communication in the global workplace (5th ed). New Youk: McGraw-Hill.