Working in Business Portfolio - Essay Example

Working in Business Pоrtfоliо Assessment Title: Name: Student ID: Tutor’s name: Date: Semester Assessed: Word count: 2153 words Introduction The purpose of the portfolio is to perform a self-post-assessment or self-inventory test on whatever I have learned during the entire course inclusive of the tutorials, lectures presentations, and groups work. This article dwells on my reflections of what I have learned in both the Continuous Professional Development and Communication Skills units. The article further expounds on my learning styles, teamwork experiences, group conflict resolution, and management styles and its applications in an organization. I further break down and outline my weaknesses, strengths, self-goals realized and set during the learning process. I also outline the methodologies of how to accomplish the goals. I drew the assessment experiences from group activities and discussion during team presentation. This reflection article attempts to show that I have learned and have the clear understanding of an effective group (Sims & Serbrenia, 2000). Therefore I outline the conflict my reteam member has before and during team presentation. During the presentation I learned that my leadership skill are not that honed and that I need to lead the team always. I also set goals to be able to assist, prevent, or resolve possible team feuds in the future groups I will be part of in my future career. Section 1: Intrapersonal effectiveness Learning in school has been quite an enchanting experience for me. I get exposed to various teaching methodologies such as tutorials, lectures, experiments, group work and field work. I get to do this in a multicultural environment where student’s population is rich in cultural diversity. During the teacher lectures, I find myself relating the communication skills from the lecture notes, and handouts to the current people in the news and media especially on how they presented themselves. Using the office knowledge I gained in my previous internship, I related to the kind of organizational letters, memos and report writing and presentation the lecturer made referrals to. Under the Continuous Professional Development unit, I compared the professional conduct with the tutors conduct at school, thought of ways I would adhere to the rules, and cultivate the professionalism spirit in me. Kolb came up with his four learning styles: converger, diverger, and assimilator and accommodator in1984. He outlined two related experience-grasping approaches: concrete experience and abstract conceptualization and experience transforming approaches: reflective Observation and active experimentation. His ideal learning process encompassed the four modes when situations demanded (Whetten & Cameron, 2002). My learning style encompasses two of David Kolb styles: diverger and accommodator. My key strength is that I tend to concentrate on concrete experience and reflective observation, thus as a 'diverger' am always imaginative and brilliant in formulating ideas and visualizing things from new perspective. I am practically good at engaging in the world activities rather than just reading about them. Daquigan, (2002)theorises that this is related to an accommodator who uses concrete experience and active experimentation. Every time I encountered a new methodology, I tried to apply in the daily course. During the group meeting and presentations, I tried to emulate most of the professional in my neighborhood, how they responded to questions and situations. Whenever I was doing a chore that required interaction with others, I saw it fit to be polite and use some educational knowledge when conversing with them. When dealing with assignment I made different citations according to the referencing styles tough in class: APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard and so on (West-Burnham & Coates, 2005) All these practices instilled sense of self fulfillment and I enjoyed the learning process. However, I analyzed the Kolb's strategy for making the four styles extravagant; it does effectively adhere different cultural conditions and learning experiences. I felt that Kolb’s ideas of steps does not rhyme with the reality of my learning process and has weak empirical evidence of effective learning (Rozell, Pettijohn, & Parker, 2006). The process does not cover the process of my reflection adequately. Finally, the knowledge and learning relationship is much complex than how Kolb draws it. Besides Kolb learning style I also felt that Jacksons learning styles applied to my learning pattern. Jackson designed this hybrid model with arguments of positive and negative outcomes in education, community, or work. Its combination of biological theories of personality and social-cognitive mechanism makes it rich. Jackson states that person who has a biological drive to explore the environment is a sensational seeker. According to Clifford & Thorpe(1999 ), the person is seen as primitively driven and requires a sophisticates sophisticated socio-cognitive mechanism for earning functionality .The socio-cognitive functionality is subdivided into: goal-oriented, conscientious, deep learning achiever and emotional intelligent achievers. Jackson defines that my learning styles can be influenced by biology, choice, and experience. His profiler assesses how people learn to work and is used in business settings. It helped me evaluate how I would suit in a working environment (Evans, 2002). His model explains functional behavior such as entrepreneurship, educational excellence, and work success and dysfunctional behavior such as delinquency and antisocial behavior. I appraise this model since its evidence is impressive, as increases performance and conscious achievement reacts to intervention while sensational seeking does not. I define myself as a Conscientious achiever who has responsible perseverance and planning. Haines (2008), attests that my rational and emotionally independent thinking during learning earned me the character of an emotionally intelligent achiever. Jackson defines that as a goal oriented achiever one should master allocation of cognitive resources toward achievement of difficult goals. To understand this model I can use an arrow shooting the target. The hitting process is compared to learning process but all the other type of bad shooting or missing represents dysfunctional learning. High sensational seekers, who may not be in a position to express their need for curiosity by embracing their socio-cognitive mechanism, may have the will to be healthy (Sims & Serbrenia, 2000). They will use crude means to acquire wealth-“grab and smash” techniques. Contrary high sensational seeker with drive will achieve the wealth though company creation, higher sales, and bonuses. I challenged myself to develop the high-seeking mentality in the next two years; which would be of help in my latter profession since I would establish a valuable niche in the company. This goal would help me drive the performance of the organization higher thus earning myself good returns, promotions and bonuses. I agree accept my weakness that I may not be anywhere near to being the role model of a good student. Thus, I promised to engage at least the four approaches to develop strength in experience grasping and transforming aspects of learning to be an effective ideal student, Section 2: Interpersonal effectiveness Group work experience In the group were the members consisted of students with diverse need and goals, which resulted in conflict. Denise, a mettle lady would not agree to compromise on her decisions, she fought to have her ideas be among the final decisions. She could not bear to have her points discredited hence the group meeting always ended in a stalemate and time wasting. She also wanted Bill the introvert guy to give his views. Bill the painfully shy guy found this intimidating and the lady wouldn’t have any of it till he made his contribution. Jeff and Jane always made a debate out of anything; the two are strong willed personalities. They loved challenges that involve arguing that always seemed the power of the might. I on the other hand was the team leader. Sometimes the team felt that I over exercised my power and shied off whenever my leadership skills were needed or need to stamp authority. Bill thought I should always come to his rescue whenever Denise picked on him. Denise thought that I always shied off whenever Jeff and Jane’s arguments began. She further said that I was always picking on her whenever I thought she had ‘outrageous ‘demands. There are five main strategies of handling conflict; avoiding, compromising, accommodating, forcing, and collaborating. Collaborating and compromising are the two most effective strategies. In collaborating, each party cooperate with the other in order to understand their concerns and vent out their interest in order to arrive at a mutually satisfactory solution of the conflict. Collaborating strategy is mostly important when there is time constraint, and the group is dealing with difficult feelings. Thus, conflict resolution strategies aims at increasing team performance. Though the conflict existed it wasn’t extremely bad to the group. It helped us sit down as group try to manage the group conflict. It lead to increase understanding as Jeff and Jane's arguments of wit lead to the group getting more informed of the unit details. After the conflict resolution all the group members learned an insight of how they could achieve their goals without oppressing other members, it increased the group cohesion, through the resolution process I got to gain mutual respect for Bill, Jane, Denise and Jeff. All of us got a renewed energy and believed that we could work together. Through the conflict, we got improved self-knowledge. However if the conflict was not handled properly we would have damaged our group. Conflicting goals could turn into one disliking the other. Bill dislikes Denise behavior of picking on him. His spirit of teamwork could have broken down if it were not for early intervention. This would have resulted in recrimination and group works spiraling down. The interest based relations approach had six key points. Keeping the relationships as the priority thus, treating each other with respect and calm. Being courteous helps to achieve this, isolating each problem form the people, we understand that maybe Denise, Jane, and Jeff were not being difficult but that recall differences lied behind their positions. Thus, we debated without damaging relationship. According to Ladd ( 2007), the group members paid interest are being represented. By listening, we would understand each other’s point. Listening then later talking is another key point. This promoted orderliness and helped to set up facts. We agreed to establish the objective and observable elements that influenced the decision. Lastly we explored the options together thus explores more options than before. The conflict resolution process includes several steps. In Step one the Scene was set; to make the members understand that the conflict is mutual and can be solved through discussions and negotiation. In this phase use active listening skills to understand others perception’s (Aldag & Kuzuhara, 2002) .The group used Jane a mediator between Denise and Bill’s conflict. Jane restated, paraphrased and summarizes their conflict causes and helped them understand their points amicably. The second phase is to gather information where we asked for Jane’s and Jeff’s view and confirm if they respected e their opinion and the need for cooperation to solve the problem. In this phase I used ‘I’ statement, clarification of feeling and people remain calm. Phase 3 was to agree that the group was rocked with problems. We agreed on the problems were solving; Denise intolerance, Jane’s and Jeff’s arguments and my inadequate leadership skills. In this phase, some members may see different but overlapping problems (Fry, Bj”rkqvist, & Bjorkqvist, 20013). The next step was to brainstorm possible solutions. This phase aimed to have everyone’s feeling get satisfied for having fair input into the solution. The possible solutions was to have Denise be more tolerant towards bill, bill needed to be active in the group work. While Jane and Jeff were to divert their energy into thinking of ways to create more points rather than argue. I was to be stronger and sharpen my leadership skills (Whetten & Cameron, 2002). It required open mindedness to all ideas including those we have never considered. The final phase was to negotiate solutions. This is where solution was arrived at, at this stage; we may have to uncover real differences in the groups and arrived at win-win situation. The main principle in this entire process was to be calm, patient, and respectful. Conclusion Conclusively, because of evaluating my learning skills and conflict management, I got to reevaluate my goals on closer details, realign my priorities. I got to acknowledge that I am a divergent as well as an accommodative brilliant learner through Kolb’s learning styles categorization .I also got to understand the most important things and qualities to me and enhance my effectiveness as a team member and more so as the team leader (Ladd, 2007). The team conflict management was a revelation to my weak leadership skills as well as an insight to handling diverse team members. The outcome of the conflict handling strategy is that the different perspective can lead to better solution and stronger commitment to the solution made. The conflicts in a group may arise from difference in roles, perception, information or values and beliefs. If a group conflict is not dealt with it, it leads to loss of productivity and time in an organizational setting. The communications skills techniques and aspects learned in BSB124 will go in long way in working with organizational members. I would be able to communicate constructively and effectively. References Aldag, R. J., & Kuzuhara, L. W. (2002). Organizational behavior and management: An integrated skills approach. Cincinnati,OH: South-Western Thomson Learning. Clifford, J., & Thorpe, S. (1999). Workplace learning & development: delivering competitive advantage. Kogan Page. Daquigan, J. (2012). Learning Styles of Medical Technology Students: A group thesis. GRIN Verlag. Evans, C. (2002). Learning styles in education and training. Emerald Group Publishing. Fry, D. P., Bj”rkqvist, K., & Bjorkqvist, K. (20013). Cultural Variation in Conflict Resolution: Alternatives To Violence. Psychology Press. Haines, R. L. (2008). The Relationship Between Learning Styles and Test Performance in Aviation. ProQuest. Ladd, P. D. (2007). Relationships and Patterns of Conflict Resolution: A Reference Book. New York: University Press of America. Sims, R. R., & Sims, S. J. (2000). The Importance of Learning Styles: Understanding the Implications. Greenwood Publishing Group. West-Burnham, J., & Coates, M. (2005). Personalizing Learning: Transforming Education for Every Child. Continuum International Publishing Group. Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2002). Developing management skills, (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: : Prentice-Hall. Read More