MSLD 511 Personal Blog

Common restraints that I have placed on myself within my workplace are self-doubt and apathy. Examples of self-doubt would be questioning myself on a specific work procedure or information I share with a potential student or holding back an idea I have during a team meeting. Throughout my last year and a half in the admission department, I am aware that I am sharing the correct answers to common questions and how to complete my work tasks throughout the day. My two managers have informed me that they believe I have excelled greatly and am one of their strongest counselors, however I continue to doubt and question throughout the entire day. The second constraint, apathy; often when work is slow, or I feel as though I am not flourishing within my office, I am unmotivated to complete the simplest office tasks. These are two common restraints that I know I need to destroy in order to engage in problem solving with my team and individually. The constraint of apathy has prevented me in...

At first, the thought of spending ten minutes a day doing nothing made me a little stressed and anxious, as I feel as though my “to do” list is never ending. My initial thought was, “why not use those ten minutes to work on my Fall travel or start on homework?” However, throughout the last 4-5 months, I have learned and am learning the art of taking time to reflect and take time out of school and work to do things that I love. Taking ten minutes a day doing nothing helped me to learn that ten minutes can fly by and I learned that some of my stress is self-induced.   After listening to Puddicombe’s talk, he made multiple statements that stood out to me about stress and resting our minds. He states, “we are no longer present in the work in which we live and we miss out on things most important to us” (2012). With the influx of work and school lately this is true for my life. When I am trying to enjoy time with family, I am thinking about all the work that needs to be done bef...

In January of this year, I started the journey of my Masters in Management with a concentration in leadership. After completing and passing my first course, I was given full access to take any of my management and leadership courses. I embarked on my first leadership course while simultaneously taking a management course, which I was quite timid to start. Having had little experience with leadership and never studying it before, it seemed like a very tall mountain to climb. After the second week in that class, it was by far my favorite in my academic career thus far. Dissecting leadership skills and how a leader can be formed and can form people was extremely inspiring. I was tasked with completing self-assessment tests about my own leadership qualities, which was very eye opening. It helped me to be more self-aware in every aspect of how I carry myself in my office to how I do my daily office tasks. Whetten and Cameron state that the five most critical areas of self-awareness in man...

I have always tried to be very careful in how, when, where, why and who in regards to communicating in a professional environment.   Individuals can take something simple you are asking or saying in a very negative manner if you do not frame the conversation properly or in a good timeframe. Due to this, this course was very interesting to me as I had never thoroughly analyzed or dissected communication that occurs via letter or CMC, etc. I have already and will continue to apply much of what I have learned in this class as far as communication goes. I want to continually strive to communicate with my co-workers and managers in an effective fashion. Module 1 (understanding managerial communication), 4 (communication technology and group communication), 6 (providing feedback and communicating about change) and 7 (communicating across organizational boundaries) were all very eye-opening to me. Clampitt states, “we need to be mindful of how channel attributes translate into benefits,...

Leadbeater’s talk brought up some interesting points that through innovations and with time have been proven true. I know within my organization I can spur creativity within my department and I do think if superiors heard and potentially implemented workers ideas for travel, student information and presentations that we could benefits from their creativity. Since the workers are the ones out “in the field” I do believe that one person’s creativity could eliminate time-consuming procedures and instill new procedures. Since a small aspect of our job is very autonomous, we often do our own “procedures” within our job. Due to this we have to be creative and do our work to be best of our abilities and with our own creativity. If we communicated openly and met often with our colleagues, I think we could all learn a great deal from each other. A way we could communicate that creativity is not just for “special people” would simply be to encourage employees to share their ideas and though...

Within my department and a few others here at Embry-Riddle Prescott, I do see a team that strives to work across organizational boundaries to the best of their abilities. Of course, I also see areas that could certainly be improved in this area. The admissions department at Embry-Riddle works very closely with financial aid and academic advisors. Since information can become skewed and processes for students and families can be undesirably long, we attempt to reduce any errors in an effort to make the process of becoming an Embry-Riddle student simple and seamless. To do this, we have to ensure that each department is on the same page of the student’s information, which can be a tricky task. As Clampitt states, “Boundaries inherently create communication challenges that effective managers need to understand and master” (2017, p. 192). Due to organizational boundaries, this can be even more difficult. As Power states, “The bigger challenge, however, is not to just implement the change...

The D-I-K-A model within my current organization could be implemented in a much cleaner and efficient fashion. For example, my management does not directly utilize D-I-K-A, however the ‘followers’ (employees) do utilize it in order to complete our work. Each new season, employees must submit their proposed travel plans to our superiors. To do so, we must gather data from historical travel, generate reports based off numbers for the current academic class and review reports for potential growth within certain areas of our assigned territories.   We then review this data, and model in into justification sheets which reflect our information of the data that is relevant to our upcoming and desired travel. Then, this information is used as either positive or negative knowledge of how well or poor our territory is growing or minimizing. We submit this knowledge to our superiors to justify why we want to do specific events and recruitment in certain areas. If our travel plans are approv...