The Leader of the Gang

In today's session we continued discussing ideas for our media event. It is incredibly vital for there to be a structure to our team and it made sense to appoint a leader. In light of this, we started discussing the qualities a leader should have, citing leaders through history. Good and bad.

We decided that in some form or another, all of these leaders had qualities in common, being, strong beliefs, a good speaker and communicator, authoritative and a good delegator.

Some leaders do not possess the following qualities. However, these are what we decided a good leader should probably have:

• Honesty
• Sincerity
• Fairness
• Integrity
• Inspiring
• Clever
• Good listener

In light of this discussion about leadership and roles within a filming team we were divided into small groups once more and given a short task. As part of a hypothetical independent TV company we had to select 4 crew members for a documentary called 'Plight of the Polar Bears'. We were given a list of potential crew, each specifying their skills and any issues that we had to be aware of.

From the list, we chose the following crew:

• Richard Hastie - Camera man and Wildlife Photographer. A bit of a loner but we figured he would be able to get on with the job at hand.
• Brian McCormack - A producer and director. He is fit and used to organising people and keeping up morale within the group which would be good for 'loner' Hastie.
• Sven - He is a native Inuit but doesn't speak any English, only Icelandic. He will be great for health and safety, survival and knowledge of the area.
• Ingrid Gunsten - She is a researcher but also fluent in Icelandic so would be able to interpret for Sven

We would have appointed McCormack as the leader of the group because of his production and directorial experience. Also he is good at keeping up morale so will be good for delegation.

It was interesting to hear the different choices from different groups as each production would have taken a completely different approach.

We then decided to, as a class, decide on our leader for our team. We did this by casting votes. The 3 members of our class who received the most nominations were Brad, Chloe and Esther. As the votes were too close to call we decided the fairest thing to do was to have another vote between those 3. The eventual appointed leader was Miss Chloe Sibthorp, whom I think will be an excellent leader as she is very good at communicating and being diplomatic.