MEETING OBSERVATION: ENABLING ENGINEERING STUDENTS TO MANAGE AND TO FACILITATE TEAM MEETINGS

The fourth year chemical engineering students at the University of Rovira i Virgili (Tarragona, Spain) who are enrolled to Project Management in Practice course (PMP) have the opportunity to enhance and develop their leadership competence by taking on the leader role of project teams composed by first year students. This 1st year-4th year integrated design project lasts two consecutive fifteen week periods. During this period, each week team leader students hold formal meetings with their teams to work on the project. Managing and facilitating the team meetings is, undoubtedly, the very responsibility of the team leader students. To enhance leader students’ skill development in meeting facilitation and management, it is critically important to provide leader students with the right feedback. For this purpose a “monitoring team” has been formed to observe the team leaders in their weekly meetings with the team. This article describes feedback process provided by monitoring team to leader students and its positive effect on the skill development of leader students. The monitoring team, composed of nine students, has been trained to give constructive feedback on the meetings of team leaders. The feedback process consists of monitoring the team leaders in their meetings and sending a feedback report to team leaders after their meetings. During the meetings, one member of the monitoring team monitors the behaviors of the team leader against an observation sheet. This observation sheet has two main areas of observation; management and facilitation. Management and facilitation behaviors have been grouped under seven and six areas of observation respectively. Each observation area is in turn described by four distinct behaviors. The meeting observation data demonstrated that the feedback reports helped team leaders better manage and facilitate their meetings with their team members; with observed progress in their skills over time.