Leadership Lesson 3 - The Marshmallow Challenge

Goals:

• Understand the importance of human relations to leadership
• Describe the five human relations skills
• Develop an awareness of ones own attitudes and opinions, leadership style, decision making style and relationship with other people

Challenge

Your class will be divided into teams of three to four students. You'll have 18 minutes to complete a challenge. You'll be given instructions along with all the materials you'll need. Follow the instructions carefully. The winning team will receive a prize.

Good Luck!

Reflection:

• How did your team approach the challenge? What method did you use?
• What did the successful teams do that the unsuccessful team fail at doing?
• Were there assumptions you made about the materials that turned out to not be true?
• What role did failure (prototyping) play in the success of your structure?  

Some surprising facts about this challenge:

1. Average height is about 20"
2. Kindergartners tend to do better than most adults. They tended to create prototypes.
3. Architects and engineers do the best. Thankfully!
4. Business students' project height is about half of the height of the average kindergartners'.
5. CEOs perform a bit better than average.
6. If a facilitator works with a CEO team, that team almost always wins.  A team needs someone to pay attention to the process of work, encouraging timing, improving communication, and sharing ideas. This has a huge positive impact on the outcome.
7. Monetary rewards actually hinder success. Incentives alone are not enough.
8. Teams which understood prototyping skills and given incentive produces superior results.

Discuss: Think of the role of a leader/teacher in this situation. In this case the teacher gave minimal technical instruction. Do you think this was a good choice or a bad choice? What more could the leadership have provided to help improve each team's performance? What style of leadership did the teacher employ? How do attitudes about the teacher influence job performance in this case?

Leaders must develop the following human relations skills in order to influence outcomes:

• Self-Understanding - An awareness of ones attitudes and opinions leadership and decision making style, and relationship with others
• Understanding Others - Know what motivates other people
• Communication - Being able to communicate goals and expectations 
• Team Building - Getting people to work together to achieve a common goal
• Developing Job Satisfaction - creating an enjoyable working environment

Assignment: Write a paragraph describing how a leader could use each of these aspects of human relations to help a team build a better tower. Make sure you address each of the five points and write in complete sentences. You should have one or two sentences for each point. 

Vocabulary - Study to following terms for the next quiz

• Human Relations
• Human Relations Skills
• Self Understanding
• Team Building

Standards:
11.1 Analyze the needs of employees.
11.2 Discuss leadership skills integral to groups.
11.3 Evaluate strong leadership skills.

Resources: http://teachers.egfi-k12.org/marshmallow-design-challenge/