Finding Your Passion Outside of Work

In many of my Business Management classes there is always talk about finding a career that you are passionate about and one that relates to your purpose in life. I understand that this will make your work-life balance much easier but at the same time I think this can cause you neglect things externally from work if you do truly love what you do. I personally have always looked at a job as a way to get money which then allows me to do the things I love with the people in my life that mean the most to me. This is most likely a very biased response based of where I am in my life being a senior in collage but I do not see this view changing anytime soon. I personally don't think your job should be your purpose or passion because then it becomes your whole life and the last thing I would want is for my job to takeover the things I really do enjoy. I ideally want to work in the healthcare industry because I enjoy the thought of helping others even though I am not on the clinical side of the operations. I also want to be in management for this same reasons to help people below me, and to also lead others to a common goal. This sounds like something I would enjoy but by no means is this a passion or my purpose. I believe my purpose in life comes externally to a job, and is more family and relationship oriented. This is why i think life is more important to find things outside of work that truly let you enjoy your life. For me I have always been competitive and loved sports and I plan on playing sports until I physically can not. Specifically Ultimate Frisbee has a community which is a ton of fun and I have played against people in their 60's. Frisbee it self is not my passion but just being competitive with a team while also having fun.

Team Contracts and Group Projects

A Team Contract is a "document prepared by each team prior to starting work on group projects. Students should be held accountable and responsible for their own actions. Students will develop their. own "rules of engagement" through development of a Team Contract." (gatech, 2017) In a few of my classes we have had to do these and it was a waste of time for these classes. As a group we came up with this contract which took about 3 hours total for one of the classes and it basically had generic stuff that we had to do as individuals in the group. In theory this sounds good like everyone should do this but in actuality nothing would have been different if we did not do them. All our assignments still would have gotten done at the same level of performance that we did them with the contract. This is because of a few reasons. The first reason was because there was an evaluation at the end of the class for your peers so if someone did not keep up with what they should have been we would have went to town on them in the performance eval at the end of the semester. The other reason is specifically related to our group. We were all pretty good students who genuinely would feel bad if we were not contributing equally to a project as everyone else. This has been the theme for almost all my group projects and in the Paul college almost every class is made up of group projects. When it comes t group projects I have never been a fan of them. I personally like things done a specific way unless its a boss telling me they would like it a different way. This has always made it hard for me to be supportive about other members ideas and decisions. In some group projects I have found myself doing more work then I should only because I know that the stuff I might produce would be better quality then my group members. This is not always the case but it has happened quite often where group members just do not know how to do something so I take it over out of the fear that they might not do as well. Overall I understand that group projects are meant to represent the real world and that most organizations require groups for projects. This being said once its your job it makes it much easier because most the people there are competent and have proved worthy of receiving the position the are in.

Gender Biases at Work

In one of my classes we had the Dean of Paul college at UNH Deborah Merrill-Sands speak with us about her life and her leadership style. She is a very successful and passionate person who has had an interesting life consistently dealing with conflict from others in her own field. The most addressed topic she spoke to our class about was the bias that consistently flooded her way as a women leader. She spoke about two case studies where the only difference in the two were the names of the manager in it one was Dan and the other was Danielle. The overwhelming majority of the cases with Danielle had very negative attitudes and responses about her leadership style and the case with Dan like his leadership style. The most shocking part is that it was both women and men who have this natural bias towards women leadership in the study. These natural biases are awful in the business world. People must do there hardest to see things with an open mind and leave any prejudice out. My teacher also spoke about this topic when dean Merrill-Sands was in and said that "most people have this natural bias but its about ignoring it and being open minded towards it" He also talked about a college who was said to be the least bias leader they know and his response was "I am extremely bias I have just learned how to control it and be open better then most people. Overall if we can erase or ignore our personal biases the workforce can be much more diverse creating a better environment overall. 

Brainstorming Constraints

Throughout my classes in the Paul college we have focus heavily on innovation and idea generating. With my major focus being in Management, this has lead me to some very interesting entrepreneurship classes which heavily really on solving issues in today's world. Innovation and problem solving are the keys to not only successful business but lasting business's. A key part to innovation used to be brainstorming. Brainstorming definition from Websters dictionary is when people "produce an idea or way of solving a problem by holding a spontaneous group discussion." This may have seemed to be very effective years ago but in today's business world  we have a much more diverse workplace and this is in the form of gender, race, ethnicity, and even extrovert and introverts. This is because managers know that diversity of all kinds leads to a company that is well rounded. When it comes to brainstorming introverts have a hard time contributing. From personal experiences of being an introvert, I need time to fully think about what I am going to say, but with to much time I always shut down most ideas I have in my head before ever saying them out loud. This is generally true for most other introverts as well. For this reason brainstorming is something that had become horribly ineffective and stereo-typically gets dominated by the extroverts who with no filter. They may be generating some great ideas but it isolates the introverts. This is why modern day businesses must adapt. Organizations need make it so everyone's voice is getting heard and brainstorming is not the way to do this. The time constraint rushes ideas and people are worried about what others will think about their ideas. This limits people to recommend ideas that are safe and do not innovate in anyway. In order to innovate and be creative its important to have some bad ideas at first but if your to worried about others opinions this will never happen. Also with the diverse workplace peoples opinions might be drastically different and even if there is a good idea other people may shut it down there on the spot. Organizations are better of have their employees take time to sit alone and write down their top 10 ideas and then bringing then all together on a later date.

Leadership in a Crisis Situation

In today's class we spoke about leadership in a crisis situations. A crisis is "a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger." They described 3 types of crisis's which are Business/Professional, Public Relations, and Personal. Each one of these can drastically effect an organization. They also spoke about the steps to managing crisis which are below.

Steps to Managing Crisis
1.Internal communications
2.Understand the potential impact
3.Position yourself
4.Create a means for monitoring
5.Learn from lessons

Ideally managers hope these type of crisis situations do not happen but they eventually will in some way or another for all organizations. I do believe the steps are set up in a good order and cover most of the details but I believe there is a crucial step that comes much before all of this. All organizations need to be proactive. All modern day organizations have to best guess what crisis could happen long before they might and have a set plan and steps to take in case it does happen. Obviously certain crisis's are unavoidable but its necessary to plan for events that are foreseeable. The more proactive an organization is, the easier it will be to solve and combat the issues at hand. By taking the time to create a proactive risk management plan organizations will be much better prepared.

Professional Development

It is crazy to think that just two years ago the only jobs I had on my resume were sandwich artist at subway and pest control technician. In the start of my junior year I was starting to become terrified of what I was going to do with my life. Many of my friends have already started internships at this point in their lives and it made me feel like I was far behind in where I should be. Its amazing to think that after just two years I have a job in the industry I am passionate about and it will turn into my full time position once I graduate in less then a month. I now look at my friends who are stressing about what they will do after graduation and I am just glad I have this figured out.

The road to get here was a lot of work but it seemed easier then it looks. I applied to about 25-30 places and got about 20 interviews my junior year and got only 2 offers. One offer was from a company I did not ethically want to work for because it was a lot of cold calling and another from a local company I have never heard of before but seemed nice in my interview. I ended up taking this position and quickly became an important contributor to this smaller operation. After the summer there and the fall semester of my senior year I found out about a job position in a hospital and I took a risk of leaving my current job and went for it. I got luckily and got it because my previous job had made me very qualified for.

This shows how quickly you can get into the career you want if you just put in the effort. I want people reading this to know that if you are stressing about your future its important to turn that stress into motivation to succeed. I personally was somewhat scared that I would not ever get an internship while in school and that I would be terrified to graduate with out a plan, but it is possible to quickly change this.

Meetings are Terrible but Necessary

The article below focuses on the negative side of meetings and from personal experience I do have to agree with a lot of the things said, but I do however believe meetings are necessary to have and give people a clearer picture of a plan that would not be possible to display over email. The article speaks about meetings as if there is some other way to get the information across but does not bring any alternatives to the table. To sum the article up they say the following: Meetings are distractions, Meetings wander off topic, Meetings have unnecessary people, Meetings multiply time spent, Meetings aren't work, and there is a The time cost of meetings. To me all of these things are in some way true to happen in meetings, but if you are focused on the correct goal some of these can easily be avoided. I know at my organization meetings do not go off topic because we are all busy enough and do not have time get off topic. At my last organization this was very true though. Meetings would end up as different discussions and this was because my boss had a laid back personality, and also goes on accidental tangents. To me its up to the leader to stay focused and they guide how the meeting goes. In my current organization if you are at a meeting it is because they expect you to either have to gain some knowledge from this for your own project or contribute your knowledge to some else. I personally leave every meeting with knowledge that benefits me, and the other people have contributed to my role and position. Some employees may feel that they did not have to be there because they got nothing new out of it but in actuality they had information for others. The article says that meetings multiple time spent which in my organization is not true. My meetings are for important projects and reports and having a 30 minute meeting with crucial people saves me a lot of time rather then emailing or calling these people and waiting for a response that may or may not answer my questions. In a meeting I ensure the people I need to be there are and can efficiently answer my questions that I need to know which saves me a lot of time. The article says meetings are not work which is true and goes into detail about why this is bad. I completely disagree with most of this. Yes this is not work, but its the time to display the work that one person has been doing to management so they understand, or its where management is explaining steps for projects or goals of the organization. This is indeed not work but a crucial part to any organization and would cause chaos with out these. To me meetings are crucial and necessary to any organization and I believe that the author of this article has had unfocused management which has stemmed the views they have about meetings.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/244499

Sub-cultures

In any organization they always try to show how important their culture and values are. If you go to any website of a business you will see somewhere the mission, values, and vision statement. Companies are trying to hire new employees based on how their values match the organizations. In my experience with my internship and my current job they both have these on their website but I never felt that when working at both that they truly displayed the values they said they did. In my current role as a Revenue Analyst at a hospital it is hard to encompass the core values of the hospital in this position. In general hospitals have pretty similar mission, vision and values and they are usual more related to the clinical side of things. Working in the Revenue Department we have a completely different mind set and tend to see patients more as statistics, data, and money. This causes a huge disconnect from the hospitals mission of "We partner with individuals and families to attain their highest level of health." In our organization and many like ours there are multiple sub-cultures underneath the overall org culture. There is nothing wrong with this as long as all the departments and sub-cultures are cohesive and working together. It is when there is a conflicting culture that this becomes and issue to organization,

Boss Gives to Much Work?

In the article I posted below it talks about how to approach your boss or colleagues if you have to much on your workload. They brought up some pretty obvious points but I believe they ignored that for some employees this is not much of an option. In my position at the hospital I have a relatively small workload being new and part time currently so I do not face this issue, but the two other full-time Analysts have way to much on their schedule and are being asked for more everyday. In their case they usually go into a meeting with our boss and have no choice and get assigned a new project on top of their immense list of tasks. If it is a little project asked to do they usually have no issues taking it on, but if it is a continuous weekly or monthly report it really bogs down their work process and schedule. In the article they talk about turning down the request and how this is a good thing. They say "you’re not being lazy, and it does not reflect badly on you.” In fact, she adds, saying no from time to time increases your credibility. Bosses want their employees to speak up if there is anything that’s keeping them from performing at peak levels.” I personally would try to avoid this at all costs. Being new to the organization I am trying to do all I can to help out and be utilized so I have been taking on as much as I can. Currently it has been okay but eventually there will be a point where this is not going to be possible anymore. I will need to effectively utilize some of the strategies in the article in order to stay organized and not have to much of a work load that I can handle.

https://hbr.org/2017/01/how-to-tell-your-boss-you-have-too-much-work

Listening as a Leader

Today's class spoke about the topic of listening. This is one of the most over looked qualities of a manger that is absolutely necessary to be a good manager or leader. They mentioned active listening which is a communication technique which requires the listener to fully concentrate, understand, respond and then remember what is being said. Ideally this is something all managers should be doing when dealing with employees and vice versa. Many managers however do not have the time or focus to actively listen which causes them to have to selectively listen. Selective listening is a listening technique that filters and summarizes to achieve comprehension. With this people focus their attention on only specific aspects of what the person will be saying. If done effectively this can be a very useful tool for managers to use when dealing with their employees and also their bosses.

In an article I have posted below it mentions three levels of listening that people tend to do.
Internal Listening: Which focuses on your own thoughts, worries and priorities even when your pretending to focus on the other person.
Focused Listening: This method is where you are listening to the speaker but not connecting to them in anyway, missing small nuances of the conversation.
360 Listening: In this method you are listening to what they are saying, and how they are saying it and are able to ask questions.

Out of the three above I notice myself doing the first one the most. This is not because I am uninterested with what people say but instead when people say stuff it causes me to think about certain things in my life and my mind tends to get side tracked with other stuff, I have worked towards becoming a better 360 listener but it has been challenging. Working towards  my professional career has helped a lot since it is necessary that I listen in order to keep my job.
In my opinion managers who have started low in a company tend to be very good listeners because in the lower positions you have to be a good listener to succeed. Entrepreneurs might be a good leader but struggle with listening because they have never have taken orders or directions from other people therefor not being able to practice the necessary listening strategies you get over time.

https://hbr.org/2016/05/listening-is-an-overlooked-leadership-tool

Qualities in a good Mentor

David and Colleen presented on mentoring and spoke about different forms of mentoring and also what makes a good mentor.  There are peer mentors, role model mentoring, reciprocal mentoring (alternating roles of mentor and mentee), Reverse Mentoring (older executives paired with younger employee), and group Mentoring. In my life I do not have a whole lot of experience with having a mentor. I have however been an academic mentor for the past 2 years. What we do is help students get back on the path of success through study strategies and time management. This style of mentoring is closest to the peer mentoring somewhat mixed with role modeling. One thing they spoke about is that in a mentor position whether you are the mentor or mentee, usually both sides are getting something positive from it. In my experience this is true, since starting as an academic mentor I have consistently made deans list which i did not do before starting the job. This was because to be a mentor and teach others how to succeed I need to improve my own skills first. What also contributed to this is also my students unique ways to approach situations gives me new and creative ways to go about my own. In the presentation they mentioned that the mentor and mentee must commit to continuous learning which is something that is challenging to do in my position. I find myself teach similar strategies to most the students I meet with, and from their perspective we are only paired together for 4-7 weeks so it is not a very long lasting mentorship. In my job though I could focus more on learning from my mentor rather then me commanding the meetings like they spoke about. The relationship should be more open to both sides sharing thoughts and ideas rather then just me telling them what will work.

Disconnect Inside Organizations

Today Jason and Erin presented about the Disconnect between management and doctors. They started byfocusing on ways to stop conflict and talked about the three examples below.
Stopping conflicts proactively
Blaise Pascal: Suggest to change someones mind instead of completely disagreeing with them, by offering different perspectives.
We/They: Making others out to be the bad guy example: if it was up to me it would be yes, but management says no. Even when its not positive management must take ownership of it, and not put blame on others. this equals bad management. This must be stopped to create a better team culture.
Asking Instead of Telling: need to promote an organization where employees are encouraged to speak up. This can be done in the form of questions, and this way it does not come across as a lower employee correcting a senior employee but instead it is them trying to genuinely learn what is happening.

I agree with these all in some aspects. As Professor Bonica said never put the blame on the boss it will usually only end in a negative way. In general this sounds like common sense but in many situations most people don't rationally think a small comment like this will have any real effects.

In my academic mentoring job I currently work at I am responsible for helping student attain the grades they want to achieve through study strategies and time management skills along with my own experience in these classes. My go to strategies when dealing with these students I mentor is the asking instead of telling strategies. I do this for many instances not just when correcting a students error. This also allows them to fully question themselves to come to a conclusion rather then just have myself tell them the correct answer. This strategy resonates with students better and allows them to fully remember what we spoke about because they came up with the solution and not me.

When speaking about my organization the conflicts between the Admn and Physicians is something I do not see as much. This is because my revenue department is not actually in the hospital so its not as clear to me on the relationship. I believe knowing each sides reasons for the actions they take and getting these motives on a similar lever is a great way to minimize conflict.

First Evaluation

As I spoke about last week I had my first Evaluation at my job at Wentworth Douglass last Friday. Being my first evaluation I was a little nervous going into it but I knew there was not a lot at stake since I am still new and only working part time while I am there. For this evaluation The day of I was told that I needed three to five goals to bring with me to this meeting and these goals will eventually be looked at to see whether I have met them which will dictate a pay increase at the time of my next evaluation. This Evaluation was an introductory one so it did not emulate any specific type of evaluation that the specific group had spoken about in class. The closest type this related to was critical incidence which uses specific points in times as examples on what is going well and what could be improved upon. For the most part everything was very positive and the things that management wanted me to improve upon were explained in a way that was not confrontational but also got the point across. This is something that was talked about how the areas of improvement should have detail behind why they need to be improved but put in a way that does not cause the employee to feel attacked. My manager said at my next evaluation which is going to be the more important one, I will be evaluated by a numerical scale being 1-5. I found this interesting since this was described the same way professor Bonica had us do evaluations last semester for our group members. Usually 3 is expected work to be done and anything higher means we have gone above what we were supposed to do, and if you give a 1,2, or 5 there will have to be an explanation why those were the way they were. So far this job has been challenging to juggle while being a full time student and also an academic mentor but I have enjoyed it so far and look forward to hearing any feedback to what I can do to improve my work.

Delivering Bad News

For most managers the worst part about their job is having to deliver bad news to employees even if it is rightfully so to this person. Whenever you are work with someone for some time it becomes much harder to break bad news. the article I posted below speaks about how great leaders go about delivering bad news.
The first step talked about is speaking up. This does not mean your volume but instead telling employees the news sooner then later. Some managers are either afraid of what might happen if they tell employees bad news and just go with out saying anything until it happens. This is by far the worst thing you can do for this. My manager at Wentworth Douglass has been very vocal about the merger with Mass General and what could happen which has been better then staying quite,
The next step is to be accurate.When managers try to twist the facts it can be much worse in the long run. At my old job as a purchasing coordinator for a point of sale electronics company, the management announced that we were expanding out plant facilities in new Mexico. People on the business side of the company were safe but this could have meant layoffs for many of the warehouse and tech employees whose jobs would be decreased. When the question was brought up at a company meeting one day, one of the employees had asked about potential layoffs and it was obvious he was avoiding the questions which was a clear answer that there were layoffs coming but instead of being honest he dodged around the answers making employees dissatisfied.
Another one is taking responsibility. Bad managers will play the blame game but a good manager knows that many issues in some ways can be traced back to them, and even if its not their fault they should take responsibility. When companies do not take responsibility we see cases like with BP. Initially the owner said that the spill was not entirely their fault. This only worsened the companies image even more then the spill already did. As a manager you must own up to mistakes and errors but not stop their. You have to also address what the next steps are in combating the issues. That shows a good leader because they are taking blame but addressing things need to change and they have to improve.
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For more of the reasons you can see them in this article below.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2013/03/06/how-great-leaders-deliver-bad-news/#61ca52cd3dc6

MBTI

My first post was about the MBTI and how when other take it we tend to see different results. For one of our classes we did just this. When i took this i got an INTJ which stands for introvert, intuition, thinking and judging. I personally agree a little bit with this, I have become more introverted as I have grown up and like to rationally think decisions out before making them. With this being said I had my roommate who I met this year, and also my older brother take it as me. The results where pretty cool this time in the past when I did this I had a close friend take it and they were somewhat similar. This time my roommate and my older brother had both got ENFJ. This was a little concerning seeing that 2 people in my life view me so drastically different then I view myself. I have said that these should be taken with a grain of salt since there is not much science behind it but they still have valid reasons why it gives you the type you have. This will be a little bit helpful for me to think about in everyday life whether it is work, school, or just hanging with friends. It will be important to fully understand how people view me and also knowing who I fully am myself. In on of my management classes my teacher says "that you can only manage one person an that is yourself but you can motivate others." I will need to work on fully understanding myself before I could ever start to try to motivate others in a management role.

Performance Evaluations

In my life I have never had a formal work evaluation, at my academic mentoring position I get one at the end of each semester but those are based of what the students I help say and are never negative. It is a weird coincidence that when the group in my class is giving this presentation, I also have my first evaluation for my position as a revenue analyst. Being part time why at school I assume it will not be to intensive.The group presenting spoke about different performance reviews which are numerical (tangible scale number), Forced Ranking (percent of company), management by objectives (based on goals and deadlines), 360 Degree appraisal (info gathered from customers employees and management), Critical Incidence (describing specific incidence positive or negative). They spoke more about how many of these can be used together as well when evaluating. They have also said it should not all be evaluated once a year but instead throughout the year.

I have not been told how they evaluate employees at my position and I am sure it will differ from on position to the next. The billers in my company will most likely be evaluated over the amount of claims they send out and also the efficiency. As an analyst we measure many of these vital statistics that the billers get measured on but its harder to tell whether an analyst s doing a solid job or not. From the presentation I believe it will be management by Objectives. As an analyst, management asks us to work on different projects and to meet deadlines and this most relates to us. With this being said I personally feel like I have met all my deadlines and tasks higher management has asked for me even with being a part time employee during the school year. It will be interesting to see how it goes this week. I hope that it helps me progress as an employee so I will be able to perform better and stay there for longer.

The evaluation that I believe would be best would be a mixture of critical and 360. This way there is not much competition put on the employees to do better then others. This will also have good feedback to employees with specific details on what is good and also bad. The 360 aspect allows this to be heard from many different stakeholders in this employees life. Its important to hear everyone's opinion of an employee because people might shed light o something that is being overlooked elsewhere.

Vertical vs Horizontal Management (and matrix)

There are three major ways you can set up the organizational flow of information and power. The first one is a vertical organizations. The companies who have this type of organization tend to have many middle managers from the CEO to the front line staff. This leads to clearly defined roles and is great for someone who wants to advance through an organization. Relating to my last post I believe this is important for me to make sure my company that I end up with has a Vertical structure since I would rather stay with a company and advance internally rather then job hop.

When it comes to a horizontal structure they have few layers from the top to the bottom which allows quicker flow of communication and decision making. This is great for startups and more innovative companies. There is an article below this post which talks about how "Today best companies are horizontally integrated". I believe that this is true for certain industry and extremely not true for others. If innovation is a key player in your industry I absolutely believe that its better to have a free flow of communication avoiding the bureaucracy of many modern companies.

In today's society many companies are also attempting a Matrix structure which somewhat combines both of these styles. This style tends to bring in specialist while also keeping the specific lines of business. The biggest issue with this one is that it is hard to have the employees focus both on their own individual work while also contributing to a team projects and could find employees falling behind in one.
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There is no best option overall, but there absolutely is a best fit for specific employees and specific industry's.  This becomes increasingly important for owners to have a clear vision for their organizational structure to be the most competitive and innovative in their industry.

https://hbr.org/2012/12/todays-best-companies-are-hori

Staying with one company

I recently read an article which I have posted at the end of this post, but it got me thinking quite a bit about what my career path will look like. I have been taught my whole life to work hard and do your best and you will be able to advance within a company. This has been my mind set most of my life and I somewhat hoped that I would be able to grow within an organization. The article brought up many great points about how it could be easier to advance pay by leaving for a new company, The downside to this method is that it becomes increasingly hard to find new jobs because it comes across as someone who won't stay and is likely to leave. The article also shines light on staying with a company how you tend to plateau around the age of 45 in pay and position. They also talk about how staying with a company your whole life limits your experience and also could hurt your overall skills. I believe being at a job for to long is good as long as you are advancing and not staying in the same place.  Personally I just got a job at a hospital and as long as they are willing to bring me on full time I would love to be able to stay there and work my way through the ranks. Many people in my hospital have been leaving for new positions and many people have also risen to higher positions relatively quickly. My ideal plan would be to try to stay there for 4-5 years and if I do not have any advancement of either compensation or position I think I will start looking for around at other places. I know that this sounds a little unreasonable but I do not want to be an analyst my whole life, I really want the opportunity to work my way up to a management position so I am able to lead and guide people below me. For now I am, taking it a step at a time but I think staying in one place is not a bad thing.

http://lifehacker.com/is-it-bad-to-stay-at-one-company-for-very-long-1295782130

Servent Leadership

My mentor had sent me an article about the topic of Servant leadership which in my business classes I have already learned a little bit about already. This article however did a good job relating it to the military's service based leadership which is extremely similar. The major idea to these two leaderships styles are putting the people below you first and showing that your teams success is more important then your own. The article talks about the necessary barriers to overcome to be a successful servant leader. This first part is Awareness which is focusing on knowing your employees well and also showing compassion towards them. You as a leader need to know their goals, strengths and what motivates them. With out doing this there is no personal connection between the two and they employee will just feel like they are not important. The key is to make everyone important below you. The second part is Time which relates well to the first point of awareness. This is simply making sure that in your busy schedule as a manager you are still able to dedicate even a few hours a week to promote the awareness towards your employees. Any manager could know they need to work on it but this step makes sure they act on this thought. The last aspect was Unhealthy competition. Many managers are too focused one who contributes the most and incentive's for this process. When managers do this it no longer creates a team environment but now a competitive environment. To have overall success to an organization you must promote a team environment that focus on working towards a common goal, instead of which individuals can work towards a goal by themselves. This will generate better ideas and also more efficiency. Some additional points were making sure that the front line workers are treated well and that the manager is not above working at there level with them. A quote from this is " Being of service to your employees is a process, not an event." which says that you cant create this by doing these things every now and then to try to work as a team, but instead it needs to be committed ongoing work to build your employees up and encourage team work for an over all goal.

Below is this article.
https://hbr.org/2017/02/how-the-u-s-marines-encourage-service-based-leadership

Indentity

The class yesterday focused on personal identity and asked a lot of pressing questions about this. One of those questions asked was whether or not you can change your identity. There is no straight forward way to answer this question. Identity is made up of many different aspects and my personal opinion is that you can change some aspects of these for different occasions, but you are always going to have a true identity. Personally I change my personality all the time for different social situations. When ever I am class I tend to stay quite  and just do the work. There are many different reasons for this. Sometimes its because I like to genuinely think of a good response before I say anything out loud and it will be to late to answer a question, or other times there just is not a whole lot that motivates me to share an opinion with a class. When it comes to my professional life at my work its much easier to be out spoken. By no means am I an extrovert at work but there is a lot more motivating me to share my opinions and be out spoken. This being said I tone down my identity in classes and when there is something of importance I may act extremely different. I also like how they tied in our motives to our identity and how big a role this is in our life. This was a little eye opening how the most important things have changed so drastically in my life. Even just from high school to now I used to be focused on making friends and fitting in but now I am at a point in my life where all I want is to be successful. I would say the motives behind it are pretty similar though for my self how they both in a way are trying to be likable and have a good image to the public. Overall I enjoyed this presentation and was a little more eye opening then the others they way it involved us.

Uncertainty of Change

I started working at Wentworth Douglass Hospital recently as a revenue analyst and this has been a interesting experience so far. The hospital announced its official merger with Mass General on my first day of work. This was somewhat of a strange first day being in a large room full of people who have been with the hospital for years and me not even having an hour under my belt. I thought it was a very fun first day though and did not think to much about it until later that day. I was being trained by my coworker who had been talking about how nervous she was for this merger and about her future with the hospital. This made sense based of the things I have learned in school about mergers and how there tends to be cuts in the smaller hospital. This uncertainty was a common trend through out the hospital and started making me even question my future with the hospital. For me it was not a huge deal because if I was to get laid off it does not mean all that much because I have only been there for a little bit, but for many they have been there for years and having to start fresh in the work force is always a challenging obstacle. My boss and I had a meeting one day about 3 weeks after i started about a report I was working on and asked if I plan on staying after I graduate, and I had sated that I would love to but it seems pretty up in the air what is happening with the merger. I personally knew if there were cuts in the future me being one of the newest to the team would be the first to get the boot. I then talked a little bit about how many people felt this uncertainty and she was truly shocked about this.This comment must have stuck with her because the next day she put together a meeting for the whole revenue department, which before the meeting actually scared the employees a lot more since it was titled "Details of merger". This meeting was all about the positive details and how she cant say for sure but that there most likely will not be any reduction of staff in the future due to the merger and that if that does happen there will be 6 months of compensation with also resources to help find placement elsewhere. She also went on to talk about how this merger could even mean growth in our hospital while also opening up opportunities to work at Mass General Hospital. This to me was a very genuine meeting and that every thing they said was true. If they had not done this meeting many employees may have not felt secure here and look elsewhere to work. This brings up the point that when there is any big changes in any organization it is extremely important to make sure your staff is on the same page and everything is transparent so there is no fear of the unknown,

Motivation presentation

Today in class we had our first presentation group and their topic was motivation. We had watched a Ted Talk by Dan Pink which spoke about how some of the most successful companies have the most autonomy for their workers. He went on to say that they would decide their own schedules as long as they are able to do the work they can get done. When you have the autonomy you are likely to be more productive with your time and work harder. He also explains how studies have shown that bonuses actually make productivity go down. I personally would not be able to have that much autonomy, I like my schedules and planning everything out with lots of detail. I do see however how many could benefit from this and improve their own work. I would imagine that the more trust you have with employees the more likely this will work out to their advantage. We also talked in class about how Zappos which has been very successful as a company had tried to implement an autonomous work condition and it did not work well for their company, but on the other hand this is what Netflix does and currently is thriving. To me it still takes the correct leadership, industry and employees to make this work. People are all motivated by different things so it would make sense that one worker would thrive in an autonomous work field but another worker may prefer his 9-5 job that has specific tasks he must repetitively do. I do not believe their is one clear way to motivate employees but that it depends on what the companies culture and values are and where the employee is in regards to them,

Speaking with my mentor

I had my first phone call with my assigned mentor for my health management class and I did not know what to expect. This was one of the first mandatory calls I had to make in the last year that was not for an interview or for a job I was working at. It felt pretty good to not have to worry about answering interview questions, or acting as if I was the best candidate for the role, but instead I got to ask the questions and get to know who he was. My mentor is currently the Lean Management systems program manager for the VA Portland Health Care Systems in Oregon. Being a business major at UNH, lean management is something that I had studied in many of my classes but in my four years at college it was the first time I got to speak to someone who actually deals with this in their everyday lives.Being our first ever call and contact with each we spent most the call learning about who each other was and what lead them to where they are now. My mentors journey to his position now is pretty amazing and very motivating. From high school he immediately joined the Army in 1995 and was a Non-commissioned officer in charge, and a clinical engineer. He was in the Army until 2003 when he then worked as a Biomedical Equipment support specialist at Oregon Health & Sciences University. He then entered his current place of work but as a Biomedical Equipment support specialist at the VA. At the same time he enrolled at Portland State University and received his BA in English. and then got promoted to Supervisor at the VA. He was a point in his life where he was content with his work but knew he wanted something more fulfilling. He was able to go into work and not hate it but he wanted to be excited to go to work He knew that if he got a higher education he would be able to move to the position that would allow him to do this. He enrolled in Army-Baylor University and after a year received his MBA, and MHA. This allowed him to rise to his current position as  Lean Management systems program manager where he gets to make a difference at his work and has the sense of fulfillment he had been searching for.
His road to get to where he is at now, is inspiring to me showing that its never to late to go to school. I am at a point in my life where I have a position in a hospital which I enjoy, but one day I would like to get mys masters to further myself. This just shows me that as long as you are passionate about actually going back its not as impossible as it may seem.

Self perception vs others Perseption

For my class I was asked to take the Myers Briggs personality Type Indicator along with the Big five personality indicator. This was somewhere around the 6^th or 7^th time I have taken these tests for a class over my four years in college. This was common for Business Management majors since the teachers strive for us to know our selves and they also want to know our results to understand us better. The Myers Briggs test has been sporadic over my four years and I don’t believe that’s an error. I have significantly matured and changed over these last four years and the result of an INTJ seems fitting for where I am in my life. This was very different from where I was freshman year when I took this caring much more about different things and trying to be as extroverted as possible.

The Big five test has been more consistent in my experiences taking it, attaining “OCEAN” which says things like “prefer traditional and familiar experiences, very well-organized, can be relied upon, enjoy spending quiet time alone, easy to express irritation with others, tend to become anxious or nervous.” In my own opinion, this is not too far off from how I perceive myself. However, in another class the assignment started off with myself taking it, then having a close friend and a family member take it, answering those same questions about you. The results were drastically different between the mine and theirs. I viewed myself as more of an introvert who is organized and keeps to myself. Their view was someone who was outgoing, showed little fear, and enjoyed being spontaneous. This truly was eye opening how the people close to me view me could be so far off with how I viewed myself. This was a much more retrospective way to go about taking these tests, showing me that my self perception varied from others perception of me. Rather than getting results and locking that into my ideology of who I was, I got to see how someone else views me and it was much more beneficial.

Relating this to a future in health industry (preferable in management), it has showed that it’s important to know how you view yourself but if you want to be a good leader it’s more important to know how others view you. If you ignore how the people in your life view you there will be a disconnect with your leadership and management style and it will not be as effective as it should be. Seeing how you view yourself only gives insight to yourself and might not be accurate. So, next time you take these tests have someone else take it for you as well and see how they view you, for that information is more helpful in knowing who you really are and not just who you think you are.