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.