Residency
I found that I gained significant insights from my residency in particular. My experiences there not only put my career path in a positive light, but also reinforced a lot of the things that I learned in my studies. I experienced significant growth in myself over the course of the residency and now feel that I am a much clearer perspective of myself as a leader.
I attended the Doctoral Symposium from April 17 to April 20, 2013 at Cheyenne Mountain Resort conference rooms in Colorado Springs, CO. The purpose of the Symposium was to publicly discuss the research methods and the outcomes for the students in Doctoral Research. This was to provide useful guidance for completing the dissertation research and the initiation of my career. On a personal level, I found this to be a very positive experience. I met a lot of people and interacted with many who I felt were making a fantastic contribution. I know that the people I met were genuinely enthusiastic about my entry to the field and the work that I will be doing. This opportunity for communication throughout the wider community was beneficial to me, and I came away from the experience with a lot of enthusiasm. The community was great, which allowed everybody to relax, including myself, and with that came the opportunity to really engage the other conference attendees.
I met with faculty and with other DM students, many with different concentrations to my own. I attended many of the symposiums and workshops and I got a lot out of each one. I came away feeling encouraged about my own course of study and the contributions that I will be making to this field. I am excited to start my DM program and I will definitely be attending the next conference in October, 2013. For me, it was this communication with others in the field, the validation of myself and my ideas, and these types of socio-emotional aspects that were probably the biggest takeaway...
The text does a great job of providing an overview of basic concepts in scientific management, going back to Taylor, Follett and Hawthorne. Though we have advanced our management theory far beyond their ideas, they provided a lot of the foundation of what we do today. When I was at the conference, for example, I wanted to examine the processes by which the workers did their jobs. A conference center is a fairly complex business, and of course there are differences in the way scientific management concepts are applied to services. But I looked for little things in the way the staff at the conference handled things. There was, for example, a high degree of task standardization. This allowed each worker to perform his or her task quite well, I found. Yet, because this is a service business that they are in, they need to always be in good spirits. I think it was fairly obvious when anybody was not.
Thus, most of my thinking about the concepts at the conference, at least with respect to the how the facility itself was run, relate to the psychological aspects of the job, as Follett and Hawthorne discuss. I can see how standardization is critical to the performance of tasks in a conference center, but it is interesting to also see how there is a balance so that the employees are engaged and actualized as well. If they are not, one can imagine a place like that having a high turnover rate, which of course would diminish the service standard as well. Finding the right balance between empowerment, actualization and standardization, it occurs to me, is critical to the effective management of a service business. Successfully finding that balance is likely one of the things that separates the five-star resort from the three-star resort, or the resort with the top rating on TripAdivsor…
