Monday, August 10, 2015

Braxton SL2

Chapter 4: Describe the difference between love, the feelings, and love, the choice.

The difference between the feeling of love and the behavior of love is a big one. While love the feeling is all bout 'romance, flowers, and candy', the act of love is for more than just your close friends and family. It is about caring for your employees, colleagues, and clients. It is helping them and serving their collective needs, even before your own. It is a useful skill for good bosses and managers to possess.

Chapter 4: Four communication styles are aggressive, passive, passive-aggressive, and assertive.  What is the ideal form that we should use?  What have we primarily used in the past?

On our team, the ideal form of communication that we would use is assertive. It is honest and to the point, without causing difficulty long the way. In the past, however, we have used ll of the other forms, in different ways and with different people. There have been petty plots and feuds that fall into passive-aggressive category, moments of passivity towards people not working or taking an indefinite break, and moments of aggression towards one another. No one single type was used the majority of the time. The rare moments of assertiveness were our most productive as well. 

Chapter 5: If you had to create a survey that collected final thoughts from graduating FRC seniors, what do we need to hear from them?  How could we make them feel comfortable about being open and honest without holding things back?

Some of the things that would be helpful to hear from graduating seniors would be insight such as what improvements they would make, best moments, worst moments, how they felt about how often we met, whether they felt they got value out of being in FRC, etc. Some ways we could ensure they are comfortable with open honesty would be anonymity, a disclaimer about how these answers would be used to improve the team, etc. I'm not a professional survey-maker, so I'm not sure what more we could do on this front.

Chapter 5: "Love without discipline is not love at all."  Provide some insight into that statement.

In this case, the quote means that if you truly love your employees (verb-wise), and want to serve them, you must discipline them when they do wrong and hold them accountable. Otherwise, you hurt the other employees and yourself in the process. Therefore, you must either discipline, keeping in mind that discipline in this case is a helpful, not hurtful, process, or remove them from your organization.

Chapter 7: Change is usually initiated by friction / discomfort / pain / suffering.  If you want to change your habits, where will the discomfort come from that motivates your change?

One discomfort that could motivate change is a time inconvenience. For example, a simple task that should only take a day ends up taking a week, and this ends up happening a lot over the next few months. My productivity has tanked, and I'm suffering losses due to that. This would motivate a change.

End with a summary of what you learned.
In this section of the reading, I learned about people's characters and personalities, just what is love, different types of communication, personality, and character, and much more. This can all apply to myself and how I lead.

4 comments:

  1. I definitely agree that we have done great work in the past at avoiding assertive communications. I think we could make a conscious choice this year to try and communicate our issues immediately in the open, as to avoid aggression and such. What are your thoughts on us having confessionals? Except our confessions would be public. It'd absolutely get past that passivity problem.

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    1. I suppose a version of a public confession could work... we'd probably have to fine tune it to make it work.

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  2. I agree with the discipline, but to what point do you discipline them? Do you discipline them to the point you are the bad guy? Do you become the bad guy to bring them together?

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    1. I got two words for you...public floggings. But in reality, I suppose it's a judgment call. If you need to become the monkey on their back, you'd have to do it within reason. However, if it becomes a weekly thing, a talking-to is going to be needed for the lazy team mate.

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