Frustration at Team Organisation

Hello, my name is Alan.

I am in my final year at university and I am part of a student association, whilst doing full time study and working on my spare time. Recently I participated in helping out a event called the "Amazing Race".

Some people may have seen such event on TV, but for those who have never heard of it, it involves teams of 3-5 people working together and racing to checkpoints spread out in a geographic location. At each checkpoint the team is required to complete activities in order to receive a clue to where the team needs to head to next. The team who is able to complete all the checkpoint receives a monetary prize.

However, before the event can even start, 2hrs before the participants arrive, the committee of the student association must set up the event and go over their checklist of rules and confirm if everyone understands their tasks and if the teams are arriving.

Lets say it was complete bedlam, one organiser forgot to send out a email to each team to notify and confirm arrival time, another miscounted the amount of teams participating and in general all checkpoint overseers did not fully know their events. Disappointing but not an unexpected result when the president of the committee does not know the full scope of his/her responsibilities.

When organising events amongst friends for the public one must be aware that they may become lax in their responsibilities or they do not see the urgency and importance of their tasks. It can be sometimes very frustrating, comparable to explaining reasoning of what to do and not to do to a 5 year old child, but not just one child but a group of them. This can be very frustrating to the person that is leading this.

When being a group leader, one must continuously go over what needs to be done to each group member individually then explain again to the whole group in order to lessen the interference within a communication process. However its not finished just there, the leader must continuously remind and stress the importance in order for any plans to run smoothly.

As you can see it can be very tiring, but if you set high goals for yourself but your team has lesser expectations, one must continuously push uphill in order to reap the satisfaction for yourself by attaining the desired results.

Alan