Residency I Found That I Gained Significant

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 from the residency experience. The residency allowed for me to build on the foundations of what we covered in the text. 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 from one that does not -- or whatever other success metric there might be. Of course, thinking about metrics took me back to Taylor. Measurement is critical even in service marketing, but I thought about what a funny proxy TripAdivsor is for measuring success in a resort -- yet this is a measure quite common among consumers.

It highlighted for me one of the strengths of scientific management in general, and that is the ability to recognize where gaps in knowledge occur. For example, there is a gap when we must use proxies to understand "soft" outcomes like customer satisfaction or service performance. Knowing about the gaps is one thing, of course; the next step is to address those gaps. I know that some of the subsequent literature builds upon the early theories and attempts to address some of the gaps.

This is a critical component of academic thought, I believe, because it is only by dealing with gaps in our knowledge that we can make a significant contribution to existing thought. As ideas become standard knowledge -- like Taylor's -- we must continue to build on them and refine them into better ideas, more complex and deeper understanding, and always keep pushing to improve our knowledge. It seems that, after all this time, we are still working on this process.

Perhaps we always will be, because there is always room for improvement in our knowledge. I also thought a bit about my own position. I realized that as I enter into doctoral studies, I am also making a transition into a leadership position. It was interesting to see how just taking this step gave me a little bit of formal authority that allowed me to be accepted in the conference.

However, it was also important that I started mentally making that tradition, and begin to reflect on my own leadership approaches, since I will have to utilize them as I build my expertise and credibility in the field. I realize that there is a lot more to learn about both management and leadership. I typically take a more Taylor-esque view of management, and from this I favor concepts that are built around measurement and analysis, like MBO or Six Sigma.

However, what the literature provides me with is an understanding that there is also a strong human element. I am not convinced.