Week One: Reading Notes and an Introspective look

Mitch Bullough Week One Reading Notes:

Scholar - Scholars take an iterative improvement approach. There is not a one-size-fits-all skillset that will guide us through our careers. Continuous learning is a key factor to success in adaptable environments. 

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Managing self - Effective management starts with ourselves. How manageable are we to our bosses?

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Motivating employees - Hygiene factors (pay, environment, etc.) play a role in employee satisfaction, but intrinsic motivators have more impact. Motivation is one tool in the toolbox, hygiene factors also cannot be ignored.

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Ethics - The moment we are not worried about ethics is the moment we become unethical. Assuming we have no bias plays into our own bias. A good approach may be to promote diversity and look for "uncomfortable" opportunities.

Mitch Bullough An Introspective Look:

Leading and Managing is something that I have always struggled with, but been asked to do. I have been a reluctant leader in many roles from High School sports to my current position at Thermo. Before starting this class I was interested in developing the skillset of leader but I was really unsure of what attributes a leader should have and how to develop them. I have always had leaders (and still do in some ways) that appeal to an Authoritarian approach. They expect their judgment to be unquestioned and that others will follow if they are only willing to lead. I have found myself gravitating toward that expectation when I have been asked to lead, but I am rethinking my approach.

Good leaders are respected for making good decisions and having a good strategy. They add value by keeping the big picture in mind and how the team or individual fits into that picture. Goal setting is a critical aspect of leadership and communication of goals with others is more critical. The shared vision a leader brings is the primary output that makes the team effective. 

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My goals for this class and beyond are to develop tools I can use to resolve problems in the workplace and lead individuals to succeed. My measurable goals in the short-term are to become more confident and keep a healthy attitude about failures. 

Becky Howard Week One Reading Notes:

           While I was able to grab morsels of information from each reading, one portion of the reading really jumped out at me. I have always struggled with how to let things go or as we learned in Managing Your Energy, Not Your Time; how to change your story.  I was drawn in on the idea of looking at a problem through different lenses. The reverse lens has always been one I try to use in difficult situations with colleges. It’s the shoe on the other foot idea, and I have always found this to be a helpful idea though I don’t always remember to utilize it. 

           The other two lenses mentioned are the long lens (How will I view this situation in six months?) and the wide lens (Regardless of outcome, how can I grow and learn from this?).  These two lenses are ones I have not properly dug into and I am excited to try and change my outlook on problems through these lenses. When I look at a one big problem I am having at work, I decided to use the wide lens and I am working on how I might be able to learn and grow from this stalemate I currently reside in with the owner. While I don’t have an answer yet….besides job hunting, I feel I will come away with a new appreciation of how to take what I can from the situation and be better in the future.

Becky Howard An Introspective Look:

As I take a look back at my own management style, I can see where I have struggled and where I excel. I am a people pleaser to a fault and all this does is lead to so many monkeys on my back, I no longer focus on what I was hired to achieve. My jobs primary focus is on customer satisfaction and making sure the daily process of the company run smoothly. I feel many of my subordinates come to me with problems that they feel is above them or they lack the required power to fix on their own. I have continued to take the burden upon myself, working many weekend and late nights during our busy season. Moving forward, I have found the idea of empowerment over criticism to be almost a mantra of how I want the company to be run. I want to teach them and empower them to take on difficult customer issues, planning issues and crisis management issues that will leave them feeling like they can handle it. I want them to grow and move up as managers themselves and pass on this culture of empowerment. I feel that through this culture change, I will be available to consult with them, but they will have the ability and confidence to handle these challenges on their own.

Kevin Green’s Week One Reading Notes – One More Time (How Do You Motivate Employees?) by Frederick Herzberg

The week after our first MGT 6500 class, I had friend pull me aside to ask for my advice concerning her current work situation. She described a few issues that have been weighing on her mind and expressed that the situation was beginning to impact her happiness at work. Ironically, the entire time she was discussing these issues I kept thinking about the article we read by Frederick Herzberg.

I used my newfound perspective and understanding on job enrichment to respond to this friend in need. Below are a few applications that came out of our discussion:

My friend felt that, while she has a certain expertise revolving around big data reporting, she has been utilized for other less relevant tasks. To her great frustration, even after discussing her feelings with her boss, she was offered new tasks but all the same level mundane importance.

I offered the suggestion that perhaps her boss in fact trying to help the situation by offering these new tasks. What the boss was failing to grasp was that the frustration was not caused by any certain task but rather, the level of importance of those tasks. This unintentional use of horizontal loading only made the issue worse.

I proceeded to discuss her past projects that have filled my friend with accomplishment and interest. After reviewing her list, I recommended that she go and discuss that list with her employer. I encouraged her to explain the concept of vertical loading and suggest a few ways that her boss could provide a better environment for her to thrive in. We came up with the following suggestions of vertical loading approaches that could be useful in her job.

• Instead of filling her workload with meaningless tasks her boss could allow her to focus on projects that utilized her strengths and passion in big data reporting.

• If she ever finished her projects early, extra time could be dedicated to professional training on relevant topics.

• When assigning her new tasks, ensure that these tasks are challenging so that she could fill valuable stretching and growth in her responsibilities.

These solutions would most likely increase my friends job enrichment by tapping into key motivators like growth, learning, and responsibility. Furthermore, her boss would receive a greater return on investment by playing to her strengths and allocating more relevant responsibility. 

Kevin Green – Introspective Summary

For the past three years, I have been working in the Deans Office at the Huntsman School. During this time, I have come in contact with many different types of leaders. Some are driven by strategy and data and others by team comradery. I’ll readily admit that as I began my own career I wasn’t sure exactly what type of leader and manager I would be. Would I be a micromanager or would I lead through trust and encouragement? Would I be seen as the office drill sergeant or an empowering coach?

Over time I have learned how my true character and core beliefs have helped shape me into the type of manager I am today. Through introspection I have found that I care more about team success than the fulfillment of one person’s agenda. I naturally feel that a good manager is one that sets clear objectives and assists their team in working together towards those objectives.

Through our course readings I have already been able to challenge my natural mindset and consider other points of views. My goal for this course is to broaden my perspective and learn to become a responsible and consistent manager. 

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Jesse Heers Week One Reading Notes:

Saving Rookie Managers from Themselves:

The struggle to learn to delegate; I remember (and still face) that challenge of letting go of your old responsibilities, transforming into one who enables and empowers others to achieve, and I currently see that as a challenge with the current VP. It doesn't help that we have a history and culture as a company of 'working managers'. It worked (and was perhaps necessary) back when the company was young, but the company has grown and today’s environment is a different beast; we will struggle to grow and achieve our company goals if our leaders are wrapped up in their old tasks. I will set a personal goal to save the VP from himself! Tactics: Go to regular lunches with him, show him the benefits of climbing out of the weeds in order to see the forest (big picture and strategic thinking), and help him create and support a new company culture to empower other managers to do the same.

Key takeaways: Delegating, empowering, thinking strategically, communicating.

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What Great Managers Do:

The key is capitalizing on strengths of the individual, which builds a stronger team. It's like playing chess, utilizing the unique, individual characteristics of each piece to the best advantage. Ask them what their strengths are. In sales, this tends to be a focus on measurable numbers and the competitiveness to achieve them. This is in contrast to great leaders, who find what is universal and capitalize on that, leading everyone towards a common vision and goal, rallying people towards a better future.

Key takeaways: Everybody is different, and by focusing on what makes a person different and exceptional in a way that can build on a team, a skilled manager can bring the best out of the team members and the team itself.

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Who's got the Monkey:

Always push subordinates towards options that increase their ownership of the problem.

Work to develop their skill, which will give them the confidence to take initiative and thus allowing you to empower them.

Continue to the voice the importance of developing employees, push the culture away from 'managers know and do important tasks' and towards ' we all can do important tasks'. Make the executive team aware of this need to shift the culture.

Bring up success stories, like how I have empowered sales engineers to take the lead in managing the resellers in their territories, which includes having strategic discussions on future sales targets.

Key takeaways: Empower and develop employees, which is the key role of a manager.

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Manage Your Energy, not Your Time:

Action item: Practice going to bed early, shoot for 8:30 PM (right after the kids go to bed). Hopefully this will increase the quality and length of sleep I get, and increase the amount of high-productivity morning time I have. By increasing sleep (with a solid plan of prioritiy items to tackle in the morning), I will have more energy, get the must-do items done first thing, and then free up my afternoons for creative work.

Key takeaways: Health is cornerstone to happiness and success, take care of yourself and coach others to do the same.

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Thoughts from The Finest Hours movie, and how it relates to highly reliable teams:

There were two team dynamics during the movie; the T2 tanker crew, and the coast guard crew. On the T2, they were never finished. One victory or problem solved needed to be followed up by the next. For example, they first needed to plug leaks in the hull, then make a manual rudder, then hit the shoal, etc., just like the ongoing challenges HRTs face (not much time to celebrate the wins before you need to tackle the next challenge).

Another good quote was when Casey Affleck mentioned that the crew doesn't like him. The first mate responded "They don't have to like you, they just need to trust (believe in you)."

For the rescue crew, after Bernie cleared the sandbar yet had to confront the urging to turn back, he said "I did it, I got us over the bar", but then he realized he needed the team to do it (the crew restarted the engine before a wave crashed on them), so he quickly changed it to "we did it, we got over the bar together." This was important to recognize the value of each member of the team because each one of them would be critical in rescuing the T2 crew once they were found.

Jesse Heers An Introspective Look:

I think of my role as a manager as a journey. At first, like the captain of a ship that gets caught in a squall the second day at sea, confusion, quick-decisions, and lack of direction could easily describe how I felt and acted. At times I could have used the direction of a great mentor, and I made up for my lack of experience with overconfidence and (at times) over-bearing stances. Luckily, with the help of a handful of peers, reports, and executive that believed in me, I set about on a new course in my journey towards improving on areas that I greatly needed to improve on, namely listening to others and giving those opinions the weight and attention they greatly deserve, and most recently, taking every step to empower every member of my team to take the lead and initiative in solving problems, improving processes, managing big customers and big opportunities, and finding and developing the leader in themselves.

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Dylan Caples Week One Reading Notes and an Introspective Look:

At the beginning of the class, my goal was to find a new job.  Before our second class, I had landed a job.  In my eyes, I have already succeeded.  Unlike some others, I joined the MBA program to gain management skills, as well as financial expertise.  I am not currently in a management position, but I feel I can apply many of the self management techniques we have learned about in my new role. I think that HBR’s “On Managing Yourself,” will be a crucial tool to make myself standout, and become a dynamic member of my new team.  I want to implement some of strategies laid out by Peter F. Drucker in his excerpt “Managing Oneself.”  More specifically, I believe that the most important generalized tip to implement is to know yourself; including strengths, weaknesses, the way I learn, and most importantly my personality.  What I took from Drucker’s essay is that knowing your own skills/tendencies may seem obvious, however, it may not be as clear that constantly internalizing these questions can help one achieve a level of personal understanding to thrive in almost any working environment.  I believe that going into a new workplace and asking myself what I can do to better myself and my performance will allow me to standout.

Anca's Week One Reading Notes and an Introspective Look:

In my statement of purpose for the Huntsman MBA program I recounted my beginnings in marketing saying that: “I decided […] that I would become the type of professional who could walk into a business of any kind and not only find the answers that will secure their long-term success, but also draw the map and lead the expedition.

I realized that in order to do that, I would have to build myself into an unbiased marketing polymath, and seek first-hand experience in Marketing Communications, Marketing Automation, Content Marketing, Branding and Creative Directing, across multiple industries and countries, through paid positions and volunteering opportunities. It was the most challenging of those times that I discovered what it was to actually be a manager who fights tooth and nail for their team and is repaid tenfold in loyalty and productivity.”

I thought of biased marketers as professionals so selective with the type of activities or information they chose to learn about and consider in their marketing plans that they ignore entire avenues of action and the opportunities they have to offer. “Unscholarly”, one might say. What I didn’t expect was for bias to be revealed to me in the form of my approach to work relationships, based not on issues of race, national culture or gender, but fueled by a double-whammy of high-efficiency expectations and a lingering suspicion of peoples’ abilities.

I wouldn’t say I was completely surprised by the conclusions of this introspective exercise – I could tell that I was seeing the world through a lense that had surpassed its usefulness once I stopped working in a high-pressure marketing production environment and stepped into a marketing management position that requires a mountain of creative work. I’ve been put in charge of breathing life into USU’s growing portfolio of 22 online degrees, and marketing them in a competitive digital market.

Right before I moved to USU, I held a similar role tackling mammoth tasks like that, but the software company lacked vital resources. I was under a lot of pressure to create all of the materials and online presence for the company and its product’s brands on a $0 budget and little help from other personnel. I tapped into every last bit of my inner resourcefulness and previous work experiences to become a self-sufficient marketing human-orchestra, and my effort paid off in the end. But I’m well aware that what worked for me as an independent worker just won’t fly in my current collaborative environment.

If it takes a village to grow a powerful brand, then I’m in the best position to do it: as USU Online’s marketing manager I’ve been endowed with more trust, support and resources than ever before, including that from a small, but efficient group of dedicated creatives. The challenge: they haven’t had the chance to do much work for the online, their ideas had encountered some resistance whenever they did get a chance, and they work for a group of multiple managers, almost all engaged in traditional marketing.

The online MBA launching this fall marked the university’s most complex marketing campaign
for an online degree so far, but it took a lot of work to set up systems, processes and assets that
didn’t previously exist to get it out the door. I directed, reviewed and sometimes dictated every
piece of copy, image and layout to make sure it all tied in beautifully, and showed the creative
team what a campaign looks like in my world. They were stoked about the results, but also
keen to throw in the towel and turn our first stab at digital marketing into a template for
everything that would follow.

I, on the other hand, wanted them to do their own research and exploration, find their own
copy & design solutions, and took their lack of curiosity rather personal. If they wouldn’t do
their own research, I would either have to let them turn our initial campaign success into a
permanent fixture, or… do their research for them and dictate the design for the next
campaigns. The first solution would quickly grow stale, and the second wouldn’t be scalable to
a full portfolio of 22 degrees, but I also couldn’t impose a creative task to a group that isn’t
mine to manage.

After reading the HBR article entitled “How do you motivate employees?” I realized that I
hadn’t presented our group’s need for that type of research in a way that appealed to their
needs, as opposed to mine. Based on the book’s choice of language, I put a twist a few of the
notions, and went back to the group with an almost identical action plan to the one they had
previously shied away from agreeing to. The last-minute changes made a world of difference:

1. I put the old list of tasks in a proposal that suggested the scope would be more than just
campaigns – it would be helping us set internal standards according to the latest trends.
The increased project scope made it look like a worthy endeavor on their part.

2. I divided the tasks so that each owned a type of digital asset. I told them that since this
research will make them the most knowledgeable person in our group on that topic,
they’ll get the chance to set the asset standards and templates.

3. I explained that we’ll be piecing each individual’s contribution into a collection of
standards, best practices, templates and examples shared with everyone in the group,
which will save time and ensure better quality work in the long run. They’d also get a
chance to present their findings in front of peers & other managers in a special meeting.

4. Last, but definitely not least, I promised myself (and insinuated to them) that with this
research they would presumably know more than me about each asset, so I would be
required to respect their decision. I’d be actively giving up control and bias while
recognizing their effort and accountability.

The proposal was surprisingly well received: not only did the team get on board, but they
insisted that we move the deadline up 2 weeks to present their findings at the biannual
marketing retreat at the end of May.

I still have a lot of psychological work to do in order to reduce the pressure on them and myself,
to let go of my need for control and build trust, to delegate and give more actionable feedback,
and to acknowledge their contributions more vocally. But this is a pretty good start!

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Anca over and out!