Leadership Project- Stray Animal Rescue

Leadership Project- Stray Animal Rescue

This leadership project is about rescuing stray and abandoned domestic animals such as cats and dogs from the streets. The project will consist of various assignments such as "spotters" who will be responsible for finding stray animals, animals handlers, who will responsible for securing the animals, and drivers, who will transport the animals to the appropriate shelters and facilities. The project also requires preliminary administrative responsibilities such as searching Internet resources for the availability of animal shelter facilities and their hours of operation and policies.

Initial Organizational Responsibilities

As group leader, it was my responsibility to organize the group members and allocate their respective responsibilities and our use of resources to accomplish our objectives. I wanted to implement the diamond model of leadership. I defined the task, which was to rescue stray animals, but also established a strategy for how to rescue those animals. I wanted to develop a relationship with all of the followers in the group, so that I could best determine where they would prove to be the greatest help to the project. I need to design the organization, which I did in a way to cover the process from spotting potential strays, securing the strays, and driving the strays to appropriate shelters or rescue facilities. While the short length of the project did not require tremendous change, I did keep an open mind towards change in the organization. While the two hour project was not enough time to truly evaluate the effectiveness of any single strategy, keeping an eye open to managing change would have permitted me to change strategies is the group was not finding strays, or to select a different shelter or rescue organization if we had encountered a closed facility.

My first responsibility as a group leader was to try to find a group of willing volunteers. I asked for volunteers from my group of family and friends. I began with a group of people that I know because they already had an understanding of my values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations, which is something I did not think I could impart to a small group of people in a limited amount of time. They know that I value animals. They know that I assume that most decent people will also spend a little time and effort to help animals, if doing so does not unduly inconvenience them. They know that I believe that, even if the number of strays were able to help was statistically insignificant, I would feel like the project was a success if we were able to help even a single animal. Finally, being familiar with me, they understand my expectation that people honor their commitments. Every single volunteer could have chosen to be somewhere else, but, because they had committed to doing this work, and because the group depended upon everyone honoring those commitments, I expected them to honor them.