Final Self-Reflection

management

Examples

Amber Olson

MGMT 302

Professor Habich

June 9, 2017

Final Reflection Paper

The end of this spring quarter brings the end of my presidency at a club here at CSUSB; my duties as President included but were not limited to: inspiring and empowering others, managing conflict, balancing being a leader and a manager, rewarding behaviors, and maintaining and innovating our culture. While I feel pretty confident I did decently in these tasks, I am sure that if I had learned about these concepts covered in MGMT 302 I could have done a better job. However hindsight is always 20/20, and there is not anything I can do to change the past. What I can do is prepare the next board for the future, and as Past-President that is what I hope to accomplish- using the concepts I learned in MGMT 302 to build a better club. In this final reflection paper I will outline some of the ideas I hope to implement as Past-President and student adviser to the club, drawing on my experiences as President to explain why I feel such concepts are applicable.

One of the concepts I plan to implement is expectancy theory. According to expectancy theory, if I can help the new board members understand that their efforts are linked to their perceived performance and that performance is clearly linked to valued rewards I should be able to better motivate them. I will use this idea to help me plan the board training beginning in Fall 2018 so from the get go they can understand how relevant their actions are to the club.

One of the things that I also hope to accomplish in this training is to help them feel empowered, and empowerment requires three things: accountability, autonomy, and access to information. With this in mind, I have to remember that I am no longer president and that means I cannot force my own agenda onto them. They need autonomy and that requires me to not micromanage their every move, and instead give them the freedom to make their own decisions. Thusly, when I meet with next year’s president, I will not begin by telling him everything I did and explain how to repeat it and better it- essentially, forcing my expectations onto him. Instead, I will ask him what his goals are for the club (autonomy), how he will know he is successful (accountability), and then provide him with the information I have to help him. Then I will trust him to not mess up all of the effort I put into the club during my presidency. I had always wanted to empower my board, and had no idea how to go about it. I think this was the most meaningful lesson for me; that to empower them is to “set them free” in a sense.

On the subject of trust, in class it was mentioned that by sharing a personal piece of information one can make decision making vastly more efficient. As past president, I am going to make sure that our annual retreat will have a personal information sharing section that emphasizes connection. I want people to be able to understand each other’s goals and integrity so that they will have the relational type of trust (identification trust) rather than relying only on swift trust; swift trust occurs when people assume that a person is trust worthy and then later verify that assumption.

CSUSB requires all student to go through annual sexual harassment training. While learning about it, it dawned on me that my club has no formal procedure for dealing with sexual harassment! This occurred when professor Habich mentioned how important it is for organizations to have a clear procedure for reporting instances of sexual harassment. Therefore, over summer I am going to research policies on sexual harassment and draft a clause for the club. Sexual harassment ruins the trust that exists within the club, and is an abuse of power.

I also want to draft a clause on conflict resolution. Within my year of presidency there were two individuals who can never seem to get along. I know now that this type of conflict is called “affective conflict”; it is the type of conflict that occurs when two personalities clash. It is not easy to resolve this type of conflict; it would still be nice to have some kind of procedure for reporting and dealing with conflict- a bit like the contracts we created for our group presentation. Another type of conflict that can occur within an organization is called “process conflict”; it is the conflict that occurs when people cannot agree on a process. Substantive conflict is when people cannot agree on the rational premises of a decision. If we had a pre-set conflict-resolution process, people would know how to go about handling their conflict rather than letting it fester.

Oscar Wilde once said that “Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first, and the lesson afterward.” My presidency was the test and MGMT 302 was the lessons that came afterwards, and yet because of it I think I have come to appreciate the value of the lessons even more. Still, I care very deeply for my club and my regrets nag at me. I take comfort in the next quote (could not locate the author): “It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, what matters is what you choose to do from here”. What I am choosing to do is use this knowledge to help the next set of board members.

I know that within this paper I focused only on how I planned to use this new found knowledge to help my club. You should also know that by applying my knowledge I will create skills that will help me in my future career (whatever that may be, because I have no idea what I want to do…yet). MGMT 302 was a very insightful class, and I am glad to have taken it.

Jason Sheets

MGMT 302-05

Professor Habich

June 10, 2017

Organizational Behavior Final Self-Reflection

I was fascinated by the course content in Organizational Behavior this spring. I learned that I still have a lot of growing to do if I want to be a good leader and a fulfilled employee. The key topics for my growth were “Theory X” versus “Theory Y,” empowerment, and sources of motivation at work.

Our “Theory X” and “Theory Y” discussion of management styles showed me early in the quarter that I need to evolve if I want to be an effective manager. In the past, I was a manager at a customer-support call center, leading a team of people that were all poorly trained and under immense pressure from the CEO to finish as many calls as quickly as possible. He mostly took a “Theory X” approach and that trickled down to me and the other managers. We were constantly pushing our teams harder and harder. Morale was terrible. I was distrusting of the people on my team and assumed they would be a lazy as I would allow them to be.

If from day one there was a “Theory Y” approach at the call center, I think the organization would have been very different. The low interest I perceived in my team was partly a result of the way they had been treated. “Theory Y” says that people will work hard if they are appropriately trained, and that they have an innate desire to find achievement through their work. I saw glimpses of this in my time there. In the future, I would want my team to learn how to properly complete the tasks their customers needed, so they could get some satisfaction through their accomplishments.

I can see now that my call-center experience was also a lesson in empowerment. Because I did not trust my team, I gave them very specific guidelines for how to do their work. They had little freedom. Learning this quarter that people thrive on empowerment, I would like to give people more autonomy and freedom to decide how to accomplish their tasks.

The other important lesson for me this quarter came from our discussion on motivation. I would have imagined my ideal job involving the completion of a series of easy tasks each day and hopefully necessitating minimal interaction with other coworkers. This could have been a recipe for an unsatisfying career. I have now learned that people thrive when challenged and when part of a supportive team. I need to be considering these variables when I start my job search. I need look for opportunities to push myself and be proactive about working together with my fellows.

I am grateful for my experience in Organizational Behavior. I am walking away with several new insights. If I want to be a good team leader I need to ensure my team is thoroughly trained and that they feel sufficiently rewarded. People want to be empowered. I need to get out of my comfort zone to find real satisfaction at work. That means taking on challenges and finding motivation through the support of a team.