The newbies initiative has been around for quite a while now, producing a badge of better hivers every year. Just last year, I was enrolled in it myself and it's helped me tremendously in my Hive journey. I have no doubt my colleague team leaders feel the same.

Last week, the newbies initiative for the 2023 round commenced with a discord voice chat and discussion of the theme for the first week. I read the responses submitted by my team and per my observation, the task was well understood and the team members had some very SMART goals. I’m proud of each one of them for that.

This post is my report as the team leader for team-2 on the theme Strategizing My Hive Goals For The Next 2 Months. The task basically centered on guiding newbies set SMART goals and find ways to achieve them within the 2-month initiative period. As I already mentioned, the team's, responses were very good as they demonstrated a proper understanding of the task and were able to strategize and set some very SMART goals.

General Team Assessment

Everyone in my group delivered an amazing task and I’m proud of all of you guys. Really. You guys are off to a good start and if you implement the things you wrote in your strategies to reach those goals, you actually will be there by the end of the 2-months period. If things work out well enough, you could achieve even more than you had planned.

Engagement-wise, I see that newbies made a conscious effort to pass by each other’s posts and drop some words of encouragement. However, the engagement was still not the best. I commend the group's work in trying though and I appreciate their desire to want to connect with each other, but let’s do better.

For task 1, 9 out of 11 team members in my team submitted their tasks within the given period. The remaining two who didn't submit at all, @essencewoman and @t-monnay’s seem to be dormant and all attempts I’ve made to try to reach out to them have returned futile results. The table below contains the newbies (authors) and their respective task posts. Please note that the tasks are not arranged in any specific order.

Newbie	Task Link
@newnow497	Task 1 Post Here
@timix648	Task 1 Post Here
@tuisada	Task 1 Post Here
@nhaji01	Task 1 Post Here
@pearlsuddy	Task 1 Post Here
@zzzinnn	Task 1 Post Here
@amiableamara	Task 1 Post Here
@plasticwill	Task 1 Post Here
@danielson	Task 1 Post Here

Some Observations and comments

In the presentation of their tasks, I saw quite a few team members not being specific enough in their goals. Setting a goal like “I want to increase my Hive Power within the two months” is a goal nonetheless, but does it qualify as smart? We recall some of the qualities that make a SMART goal is that they should be specific and measurable. If you’re not specific about what HP you want to grow your HP to, how do you even measure the growth? The task has been submitted already, but I would recommend that team members try to set specific goals.

Also, I think the title of the theme of the week should’ve suggested that the task was supposed to be focused on Hive. I saw a particularly bizarre entry where even though the persona set goals, the goals had nothing specifically to do with Hive or their growth on Hive. The focus of this initiative is to help newbies grow on Hive.

It appears some of the team members are struggling with connecting to threads and sharing the posts. We (team leaders) are always available to assist you in the respective team chats. Please ask us if you have any questions or need

I was really glad to see that some of the team members already knew how to use Canva and made some awesome custom designs for their tasks. If you couldn’t do it last week, there’s nothing to worry about since we covered it in the discord chat during the weekend’s meetup.

The last thing is that many of my group members forgot to tag me in the comments of the newbies-hive task announcement post. A part of the task submission requirements was to tag your team leader in the comments when you submit your post. It was made so to help us team leaders easily find team members' posts, but because some didn’t do it, we missed their posts. Please remember to tag us in your subsequent tasks.

Okay so uhhhh…. Yeah, this is it for the week. Great job, guys. Well done. Thank you for submitting your posts within the given period and don’t forget to bug me and the other team leaders @justfavour and @moremoney28 with questions if you have any in the respective team discords. Enjoy the rest of your 2 months newbies initiative journey:)

I also want to say a big thanks to @starstrings for birthing this initiative and to @aliento and @theycallmedan for all the support they give this initiative.