Archives for the Month of November 2006 on Beau Lem's MGMT250 Journal
HR Simulation Progress
Team Puma is looking really good up to now. We started off decent, but it seems our group has figured out how to improve all aspects of the company. Our company is doing really well with quality, productivity, and morale above industry average. The annual report came out to be pretty much what we expected. The goals we set are being reached at a respectable rate. Our team work has also improved to the point where our team meetings have become very efficient. Up too now I am enjoying the simulation process. I hope to see how our company in the next four quarters.
Job Search Ethics
On October 30th our class discussed ethics in business. The most interesting ethical questions were asked about resumes. Should someone make up information on their resume to get a job? It is obvious that it is unethical to lie on your resume, but I bet you would be surprised how many people cushion their resume and add things to their experiences that never happened. At first when I first started to use a resume I didn’t think there was problem in slightly making my self sound better, but I later discovered that being honest and having good ethics means more to an employer.
SMART goals
On November 6th our class talked about goal setting and action planning SMART goals. SMART goal system is about helping identify these dreams into more specific goals. In class we did an exercise of converting dreams to goals. We had to take sticky notes and wrote a bunch of our dreams down and group them accordingly. The basic categories that I had were family, career, education, riches, and personal growth. Each category could be narrowed down to a more specific goal to achieve all those dreams. Some of my dreams were to get into a good grad school. A narrowed this dream down to getting good grades now, improving my resume, and getting internships. Now that I had my sub-goals to complete the bigger picture, I defined what was stopping me. I think my biggest task would have to be time management. I noticed if you put the obstacles that may stop you from achieving the goal helps guide you in accomplishing it.
Jonah Creighton
On my grading contract my case write-up was on Jonah Creighton. To get the basic description, it’s about a Jonah dealing with discrimination within his company. He makes an effort to change the discrimination by bringing it up to his supervisors, but they don’t think it is an issue. Jonah made many mistakes while trying to pursue the issue. Jonah ended up going from a star employee to endangering his job and hardly speaking terms with his supervisor. What Jonah should have done was investigate the case more closely with more information and more proof of discrimination to make a legitimate case out of it.
Feedback
On November 8th our class talked about feedback and how it affects people. We talked about different forms of feedback such as negative, positive, and the SAFE method. It is obvious that positive feedback is always better than negative feedback. In business, applying feedback is important to help improve employees’ productivity. There are many problems associated with giving feedback too, such as constant correction or winging the feedback. People don’t respond well to constant correction or nitpicking. You really don’t learn anything because you never get time to apply the feedback before you receive more. Also having a system, such as the SAFE method, is necessary to keep feedback productive. I thought this lesson was significant, because knowing how to give and receive feedback is very important in a successful life.