Marcus Mifflin

From my project, I gained a great deal of insight into the leadership qualities that promote a highly effective research lab environment. There are many decisions that needed to be made on a daily basis which shape the direction of the project(s) of concern. As a senior lab member, I was in many ways responsible for guiding the newer members. This included training them on certain techniques, giving advice on the next steps to take, and helping them to succeed in however I could. I found that the most effective approach was to be very hands on in the beginning, and then I would eventually take a step back to allow for the newer members to develop their own skills without a need to rely on myself. In the begging things were quite slow, but as everyone came into their own, the pace of everyone's work speed up in addition to the research progress. Problems would regularly arise that would need to be dealt with right away.  When such situations arose, I would delegate the necessary responsibilities to address the issue as timely as possible. I was much more effective at doing this towards the end of the project than I was at the start. After everything was all said and done, I had become much better at suggesting possible directions to take when something didn’t work out as expected. There is a large creative aspect to this that applies to many different leadership roles. That is, we found success in a higher abundance when I applied a more out of the box type of approach while keeping the end goals in mind. However, this wasn’t always the case. Sometimes a more standard approach proved to be most effective. The takeaway was that I needed to be adaptive to the situation by considering all possible solutions.