Jackie Cremer

MGMT 310 

5-4-09

"No offense, but you don't seem like a business person to me."  is something I heard from a friend this semester.  I didn't start as a business major but I'm very excited about the things I have learned in my business classes and how to apply them.  One thing I enjoy about business is the plethora of concepts I have learned about that have been automatically relevant in my real life.  I'm not sure what qualities my friend saw in me in which he couldn't imagine me as being in business, but I hope that I am able to apply the things I have learned in these classes in order to become a person who could do well in business.  But to do this, I first had to learn what it is that I do that is un-businesslike and learn how to improve on those areas. 

One of the first things I learned about myself was something I had some knowledge of.  We covered four types of learning styles and I automatically saw a similarity in the four styles in a color personality test, True Colors, I had taken before. 

In the color personality test I was a blue-orange.  The blue meant I was caring and liked dealing with people.  The orange was energetic, likes doing things over thinking about them.  In the four learning styles discussed in class, I was mainly a Diverger, which I relate to being similar to blue.  Secondly, I was an Accomodater, which I see as similar to orange.  This distinction helped me to understand the different learning styles.  

The reason this activity of finding out learning styles was helpful to me was because I feel as if I am currently more blue/Diverger, which is associated with careers in the arts and psychology, and I would like my business classes to cause me to be strive to be more of an orange/Accomodator, which is more associated with careers in business.  Learning occurs when you go toward a new learning style.  Both Diverger and Accomadator are more comfortable with concrete experiences than with abstract thinking, but I need to make the move from Reflecting and observing  (RO) and into Active experiementation (AE).  In other words, I need to do less thinking and more doing.

I have attempted to do this a lot more this semester, inside and outside of the class.  I am very uncomfortable making big decisions and am proud of myself for forcing myself to become more comfortable in this. I have also been working on being more extroverted in my communications with people and another change I have been trying to improve on is in being able to communicate more clearly and with better congruence.

I think one critical moment for me was not even in class.  I was at my work, Jason's Deli, and was approached by the manager who hired me and she mentioned that they were wondering if I was interested in doing a different job within the company.  I would be working more in the store, as opposed to delivering, and would be in charge of more things. She took my response  of hesitancy and confusion because I didn't know if I was ready to take on more effort and more responsibility as 'having an attitude' and told other people at work about it and they in turn told me.  This is a management problem to begin with, the amount of talking behind other people's backs without dealing with the real conflicts.  But the main problem I reflected on was the incongruence in our conversation and how it made me come off as being disrespectful. 

Since I am more of a thinker than a doer, I would usually just think on this and not do anything to try to fix it, but I had just started working there and really liked it and wanted to stay on good terms with this manager and really wanted to fix it before it became a big thing. I realized that the problem laid in the incongruence of our conversation and so I called in to work asking if she would be able to sit down and talk to me for a while about the position and about how I had reacted.   She was very defensive , which is one of the worst ways to be when dealing with conflict, when I tried to talk to her but I explained that I had misunderstood and hope she hadn't misunderstood my response.   This definitely helped and smoothed out the conflict and I don't think I would have handled it as well without knowing about the concepts learned in class. 

On one of our first days as a team we made rules and group goals.  My rule that I was supposed to enforce was to keep the discussion focused on the goal/task.  I think I definitely helped to enforce this but that everyone in the ATeam helped to keep us on task for the most part. This goal came from Shwarz's ground rules for effective groups about keeping the discussion focused and which also meant to discuss until all members understood.  I think I was very helpful in that last part about making sure all members understood and also think our group dynamic was very successful overall and very cohesive. 

One issue that was a challenge for me was working with all guys but I don't think it was as much of a difficulty as I originally thought.  All of the guys in the A-team were very respectful and professional most of the time and none of them were intimidating because I was the only girl.   I think by being especially prepared and involved in the first few discussions, they saw that I was able to be intelligent and professional about the work and that allowed the atmosphere to be more relaxed and respectful later on.  I also became better friends with both Jono and Devananda which allowed us to help each other more outside of class and make it more fun to actually come to class. 

Inside the class one of my goals was to be present, physically and mentally, for class.  I think I was present mentally whenever I did make it and it's been a while since I've had an 8 am class, so even though I did miss a few classes, I myself was impressed with my attendance and owe a lot of the credit to that feat to my enjoyment of the A-team and the way the class was set up.  

I also planned to work to help all to contribute evenly to group activities and think I did not accomplish that goal as well as I could have.  I did improve in the fact that at the beginning I was mostly concerned with participation and making sure my ideas were heard but became more able to prompt group members on their opinions toward the end of the class.   This allowed me to more evenly contribute by adding to the conversation instead of starting my own trains of thought.  I also got better at making sure everyone understood the concepts, even if it meant asking leading questions that I was pretty sure I knew the answer to but wanted to help others to clarify it in their minds.  

This also goes with congruence because as a group and as an individual, we all worked to better communicate by articulating our ideas.  As discussed in the team paper, we did this by explaining our point and then summarizing it to make sure we had something for the scribe to put on the board and that all of us understood. 

Many things I have learned in management and in the business school have been concepts I have seen in the real world, including things I realized I did wrong when I tried to start my own photography business and problems that my places of employment face.  Aside from the issue with my manager and my alleged attitude problem/congruence issue I have also seen other areas where management and marketing strategies could be improved which helps me to connect the dots a little more and learn the material better. 

As discussed in the team paper, we definitely had a very easy time with conflict because we didn't have a lot of it.  We all had respect for each other and had very successful group collaborations during class.  Our one conflict we discussed was Clark not coming to class and definitely fulfilling the role of hitchhiker, but even that was solved for us when he decided to drop the class.  Not dealing with this conflict definitely hurt the group and Clark because it allowed us to instead of help each other, allow someone to fall behind enough to need to drop the class.  We also didn't work quite as well together when we met outside of class. 

Outside of class while doing the team paper it was less structured and we had more process losses and talked about outside things. When we actually met, most of the time was wasted waiting for people and then settling in and just brainstorming ideas instead of establishing firm goals for all of us to accomplish.  The best process gain we had was the decision to use google docs because it allowed us to put all of our info up on the web and allowed us to work together while we were all at home and motivated to work.  Everyone did their part well enough, but I felt like I did a lot of the polishing and editing of the paper and that we could have more evenly distributed that duty. 

 Students should reflect on their coursework to describe and analyze their experiences in their learning teams along with other components of the course.