Personal Learning and Development Focusing on the Concepts - Assignment Example

Introduction Reflective Personal Learning Learning outcomes Team working. Leadership. Decision-making. Explore your own personal learning and development Personal Experiences Conclusion References Introduction This assignment has been prepared to explore personal learning and development focusing on the concepts, themes and ideas raised within the module. It talks about reflective personal learning in the first section. The second section includes the ideas of various topics like team work, decision making and leadership. The last segment includes some of the personal experiences related to team work, decision making and leadership qualities. Reflective Personal Learning From the seminar we have well understood terms like Learning, learning organization, knowledge management, motivation, reflective learning and many more things. This exercise is more like self analysis and learning. Learning is any relatively permanent change in behavior that occurs as a result of experience. (Robbins, 1996:105) There are several ways of personal learning. A person can learn from university, practical learning, corporate training, workshops, seminars and audio visual aids etc. As the topic suggests reflective learning is a process when learning takes place as a reaction to some incidence already happened. Like seeing a colleague taking coffee from dispenser new employee may learn this. The sources can be many of reflective learning. It can be peers, certain condition or situation, consequences of action, television a normal discussion or many other things. Sometimes we not even understand that we have learnt something new unless we apply it somewhere else. Learning is a life long process. It never stops. The learning curve can be sloppy or steep but it never flats till the man is alive. Everyday we learn something, something which is new or may be we knew in the past but have forgotten. After our initial learning years that are our childhood till the time we join the category of earners, we somehow are into a very protective environment. We go to school we learn something which has been decided earlier. Major portion of our learning constitute that part only. We learn because someone else feels that is good for us. But as time passes, we ourselves start making decisions about what we want to learn and why, for example: I want to learn music because I like it or I see my future here. Organization where we work is itself an institute. The teachers are our colleagues, superiors, subordinates, culture, policies, pressure and circumstances. So far whatever we had been doing was for ourselves but in the organization we become a part of the success or failure of combined efforts. The task is broken in pieces. We need to have more communication, clarity and team spirit to complete all the pieces of task as desired. Several small and big decisions take place in the daily activities there. Some decisions very simple while other complex one may be involve more people for the decision making. When we work in a team as apart of a team, there will be some kind of bonding created among the team members, people will be from different backgrounds with different choices and preferences, habits, may be culture as well. Irrespective of all that we work together to achieve a common goal. How beneficial Team learning can be rightly explained in the following quote: Team learning is important because teams, not individuals, are becoming the fundamental unit in modern organizations. When teams really learn, they produce extraordinary results and the members of the team grow more rapidly than otherwise. (Ahmed, Kok and Loh, 2002: 47) Learning outcomes Team working When we talk about today’s complex business environment and compare it with the age of industrial revolution or think about Taylor’s Scientific Management theory where the emphasis was on the technical or efficiency. There is an enormous change in that today. The Human component of the organizations considered as a resource. Companies are taking great care of social component and their human resource today. Companies like Toyota, Volvo, Federal Express, Johnson and Johnson, GE talk about any successful company and look at the work culture they have. The stress on team work will be prominently visible. Companies send their employees for various workshops; organize various activities for their employees to build or strengthen the team spirit among them. There are several benefits of teams. Team spirit gives the feelings of security, sense of belongingness to its team members. These have a direct relationship with motivation and productivity. People have better learning opportunities with each other. Communication will be improved and the communication gaps can be minimized. When people from various stream, culture and expertise work together they learn many new things from each other. Leadership Leadership of any organization takes it towards achieving the mission and vision of the organization. A good leader knows how to lead his team. Team spirit will be high with a good leader. He is the enabler and source of motivation in the learning process. He listens to the team members and removes the barriers and any kind of hindrances. He gives the direction and provides the resources and necessary support to his team. Usually all the departments and all the levels have formal leaders. They can be at every level from supervisors to CEO of the company. The leadership style in today’s scenario requires high level of understanding of socio-psychological factors along with the required technical knowledge. Decision-making AS we have already discussed decision making in the previous sections. Our daily routine is full of several small and big decisions. Sometimes these are simple and sometimes complex. Based on the type and urgency of the decision the time and energy involve in decision making varies. Decision making is a response of certain challenge or problem faced by any individual, team or organization. For an organization unit of work are individuals working in its various departments. Thus individual decision making is the area having its own impact on the overall processes and divisions of the organization. Decision-making is the study of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision maker.(Harris, 1998) Various authors have various approaches to decision making. These approaches are based on the risk involved, opportunity cost of the alternatives, time and other conditions. One of the famous approaches to various kinds of decision making given by Rainey is as follow: The Rational Decision-Making: This view of decision making suggests that decision-makers follow a specific process where goals are decided upon, alternatives are developed in accordance with such goals, and then —the most efficient“ alternative is implemented. (Rainey, 2003: 161) The Contingency Perspectives Decision-Making: Some scholars assert that rational decision-making can only occur under —stable, clear, simple conditions. Because these conditions often are not present, decision-makers must use judgment and intuition, and undertake in bargaining and political maneuvering in their decision-making process. (Rainey, 2003: 164) The Incremental Decision Making: instead of choosing an alternative that a rational decision-making process would predict, decision-makers choose to make less controversial, intermediary decisions to ensure some degree of success of achieving vague goals presented. (Rainey, 2003: 165-166) The Garbage Can Decision-Making: This idea —comes from the observation that decisions are made in organizations when particular decision-making opportunities or requirements arise. In this model, —it is often unclear who has the authority to decide what and for whom. It is the antithesis to the rational decision-making model; solutions can be developed before problems are determined to exist. (Rainey, 2003: 167-168) Personal Learning and Development From the day one when I have started working, everyday has been a learning exercise. New kind of situation different kind of people to deal with and different set ups to look at. Each day brings a new learning experience and an opportunity to hone my skill and maximize my experience and knowledge base. This workshop has been a great experience for me. The things which I have not noticed in the past related to my own behavior, learning and development, I recalled and it was a great feeling or experience to me. Personal Experiences There are several experiences which I would like to share here. These experiences have either taught me important lessons or have been eye opener to me. Experience 1: My organization has separate wing for Branding and Promotional activities. It was a comparatively new organization and recruitment was going on there on daily basis. There were some new faces in the organizations. All were fresher from the management colleges with no experience. They had been conducting various promotional activities, road shows and other below the line activities. Usually these activities were taking place in every Sunday, which was weekly off. The duration of these activities was 2 hours to 6 hours based upon the activity at the prime time at prime locations. One day, during an informal discussion I started talking to them about these activities because prior to the decision of separate department, I was handling these activities. One of them asked me, “Sir, it would have been very difficult for you to work without weekly off when you were handling these activities.’ I got surprised because in our organization it was a policy that we work on holiday, we get either paid for that or another leave whatever we chose. The next surprise came to me at very moment, one of them laughed and told ‘Sir, I am running out of money, all the money I had for this month got spend on transportation of the activities(He was not aware of the reimbursement of conveyance policy). I asked them whether they have discussed it with their boss or not and why did not they take this issue to him? They replied because they did not know that these issues can be addressed. Now things were clear to me. This bunch of people had mind block that these issues will not be addressed or taken positively in the organization. The next action which I took was talking to the HR person. She immediately organized meeting with all the management trainees, those who had joined recently and their bosses. She informed everyone and requested the supervisors and managers to create a free environment and communication system so that these kinds of issues are handled at very early stage. Than afterwards all the new people in the organization had to go through all the HR policies and department related policies in first two days of their job and write a small test. This had been a great experience for me. I tried helping those people. It had been noticed by the management. Later on I handled the same team of new, energetic and enthusiastic members. They already had a trust on me and later we as a team achieved remarkable success in terms of creating brand visibility and product recall in our territory. Implications as a Manager As a manager I feel what I did was just showing concern and being friendly to those who had joined the organization recently. For me it was a small matter at that point of time. I became voice for them. But I never knew that being concerned will pay me so well. I got promoted, I god a very good team and I should say that somewhere I had sown the seeds of my achievement at that very moment unknowingly. The friendly environment and the culture we had developed was one of the best periods in my life and I always remember. Being good pays whether small or big but really does. Experience 2 My second experience is an example of a bad leadership which turned out to be a very good team effort. At one of the incidence, some of my friends under the guidance of a very well known lecturer of labor practices planned to organize a seminar on the topic ‘ Labor and Child Labor’. We had called one of the very prominent personalities to the seminar as a Chief Guest. It was a very small but important seminar. We were able to invite people from authority, NGOs working in that particular area. Everything was scheduled and was being organized very well. But the problem arose when the Chief Guest was not there on time. The guest was not reachable by phone and we were not even able to contact his secretaries as well. This was very weird situation because all in our seminar were equally important for us and we could not wait for him on the expense of their time. Our leader had a very good quality. He was a marvelous speaker. But at that point of time, may be he got stressed out because of whatever reason, he started annoying at us. He was very irritated and was not ready to talk at all. We had around 100 delegates in the seminar hall. The youngest of the team was somehow very out spoken. She straight forward told him, Sir we needed your leadership here when we are stuck up with something very serious. May be you do not know how to handle this situation but as a part of this team I know what we have to do. She asked on of us who eventually were very good at stage to handle the stage and start the conversation. Thankfully, at the moment she started talking about labor policies the guest arrived. The seminar was great success. It brought the labor welfare department and various NGOs’ together. People got a chance to know about the good practices of NGOs and those who were individually working for the same cause learned about resource utilization and management. Our leader later on realized something. He called for meeting. We met him. He individually thanked all of us for such a good performance and asked each of us about the problem we felt organizing the seminar. Everyone told the same thing together. He apologized and said that this is the thing he learnt from us not to lose hope or temper. Implications as a Manager: As a team member I felt very good. One person there was able to stand for something which was wrong and took decision. The comfort level or zone was developed because of competent team members. But things would have been much better if our leader had taken the decision. But that moment energized us to perform. We worked as a team and strengthen our relationship. Experience 3 We heard news that a new General Manager for Branding and Promotional activities is going to join the organization. He was a person with 27 years of industry experience and had joined us from a very good organization. We all had discussed about him among each other when we heard the news. At the back of our mind the image of last GM was very strong. Our last leader had somehow autocratic style of management. He never spoke much or anything other than work. We hardly participated in any decision making process during his tenure. We had the same kind of picture in our mind. When the GM National joined, we received a mail introducing him and saying ‘Tomorrow meeting at 3 pm.’ From him. We all reached conference room with all our files ready so that we don’t miss to anything in his first meeting. First thing itself was very strange that our new GM instead of communicating something through Assistant GM was communicating to us directly. In the seminar hall GM asked each of us to introduce ourselves briefly and the project we were working on. He listened to each of us very carefully asked questions related to our projects asked about competitors strategies. He than asked us what kind of things we should do? Each of us had some ideas for the operational strategies. We told him that. The meeting ended very well. It was a very comfortable feeling. He told us that next meeting would be after 3 days and gave us some assignments to think about. After three days the next meeting we came with our assignments in the meeting. He discussed various issues and strategies based on our views and opinions. Actually it was a brain storming session. It was a great learning experience because every time there was logic, reason, its impact and expected result analysis. Sometimes it was based on customer behavior; sometimes it was on the resources available or organizational vision. He armed us with authority, responsibility and knowledge. He taught each of us various ways of decision making and analysis. Every Friday was our reporting and review meeting which earlier used to be a tough day now had become a day to wait for. The reason was that our work was being recognized we were getting motivation. He started open cabin policy which means that whenever you are stuck with something can communicate freely. I have seen one person changing the overall environment of the organization. He transformed the traditional culture in the learning organization culture. Implications as a Manager Each one of us who worked with him developed himself into a very competent individual. At the starting of our career working with a person like him has really paid us well in terms of professional and personal development and growth. Conclusion Our life is an ongoing learning process and our work is something where we spend maximum active period of our lives. Organizations today are transforming themselves into learning organizations. They have understood the benefits of human resource and team learning processes. The old concepts like Decision making and leadership are still evolving. We learn each day. From small or big acts, from communication, from the dedication and loyalty towards work, from each days new situations. We learn from each of them and it gets reflected in our personalities. This is what we called is reflective learning. When we have positive attitude, we spread the same message in our surroundings and may be we are the part of teaching the benefits of positive attitude to someone around us. This makes one thing very clear. We are not just responsible for our own behavior but also have a reflective impact on others. So we need to be very careful about ourselves, our thinking, decision making and words we use for ourselves and others. References Rouda Robert H. & Mitchell E. Kusy, Jr., CAREER DEVELOPMENT http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~rouda/T4_CD.html accessed on 3 December 2005 Dr. Tom Spradlin, ‘A Lexicon of Decision Making’ http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/daweb/lexicon.htm accessed on 3 December 2005 What is meant by —decision-making“in the context of eco-informatics? http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:aXchQeAKS7sJ:www.evergreen.edu/bdei/documents/decisionmakingsummary.pdf+Define+decision+making+rational+garbage&hl=en accessed on 3 December 2005 Covey Stephen R., Be Loyal to Those Absent, http://www.franklincovey.com/foryou/articles/absent.html accessed on 4th December 2005 Character First, Interview with Stephen R. Covey http://www.franklincovey.com/foryou/articles/char.html accessed 4 December 2005 Introduction to Decision Making, Harris Robert, Version Date: July 2, 1998, http://www.virtualsalt.com/crebook5.htm, accessed on 3 December 2005 Rainey, H. (2003). Understanding and Managing Public Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Zeithaml Valarie A. and Mary Jo Bitner, 2002 ‘Services Marketing-Integrating Customer Focus Aross the Firm’. 2nd Ed., New York: Tata McGraw-Hill Ahmed Pervaiz K, Lim Kwang Kok and Ann Y E Loh, 2002, ‘Learning Through Knowledge Management’, Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann. Robbins, Stephen P., 1996 Organizational Behavior, 7th Ed., New Delhi, Prentice Hall of India Pvt Ltd. Read More