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.
\
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