Assignment: Individual Reflection: Blueprint for Professional and Personal Growth -Your Future as a Manager, with Executive Summary of Class and Collaboration Skills
As you begin this assignment, review the broad range of topics presented throughout the course related to managing people and fostering collaboration. Clearly, 8 weeks does not provide enough time to explore all the topics of this course as deeply as you might have liked. For this final Individual Reflection, select concepts or topics that resonated with you during this course and commit to learning more about them. To bring this commitment to life, identify concrete action items that will support your goal to deepen your personal learning experience in the coming year. Then, consider the following:
• What can you do now to integrate the experiences and insights you had in this course with your personal and professional development goals?
• What are the most important things you are taking from this course that will shape your future and enable you to make a positive difference?
The Assignment
All components of the assignment must be turned in as one document:
1. The executive summary: Write an Executive Summary of the course (2-3 paragraphs) that addresses the following questions:
o Which content and assignments in this course improved your understanding of managing people and fostering collaboration within your organization (or one with which you are familiar)?
o What impact has your improved understanding had or (what do you anticipate it will have) on the value you will bring to your role within an organization?
o How have the content and assignments changed the way you think of the manager's role within the organization and the way you will practice management and collaboration?
o How have the content and assignments shaped your goals now and how do you anticipate they will shape your goals in the future?
o How has the content in this course helped you appreciate the role that managers have in facilitating positive social change within an organization or more broadly?
2. After considering what you have learned in the course, review the article by Christensen (2010). Then create a strategy for your professional and personal life that will enable you to be the person you described in "Your Sentence" in Week 3. As part of your strategy, be sure to include responses to the following questions:
o How can I be sure that I will be happy in my career and be the manager I aspire to be?
o How can I be sure that my relationships with my spouse/partner and my family become an enduring source of happiness?
o How can I be sure I will maintain my personal integrity, regardless of ethically challenging situations, or morally ambiguous situations? (Hint: Most people consider themselves to be ethical and would not think they could violate their personal integrity. But what would you do if your employer asked you to perform a task or make a decision you are ethically uncomfortable with (but is not illegal), when failure to carry out such a task would risk your termination, your next promotion, or upcoming pay increase? What might you do if you discovered that a task or policy you carried out in good faith had unforeseen consequences you would feel the need to correct? Seriously reflect on how you will safeguard your own integrity, even when faced with an ethically ambiguous situation, potentially harsh personal consequences, or attempting to right a wrong you may have committed.)
3. Your action plan: Write a detailed action plan for one new goal for professional and personal development (you will continue to build on the list of goals you started in your previous course). Include the following in your action plan:
o Your specific goal for professional and personal development with an explanation as to why you selected the goal. Be sure to provide concrete and specific examples of why the goal is important, the extent to which this goal enables you to be an agent for positive social change, the personal or professional value you expect from achieving each goal, and how the goal relates to the resources you reviewed in the course.
o At least two objectives for the goal you have identified. Provide a rationale that explains how your objectives support the goal.