A630.3.3.RB - A Day in the Life of the Culture Committee

    The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit (Haasen, 2003). This mission statements is in aligning to how Brown (2011), defines how an organization creates a culture within their company. The term “organization culture” refers to a system of shared meanings, including the language, dress, and patterns of behavior, value system, feelings, attitudes, interactions, and group norms of the members (Brown, 2011). Southwest airlines created a culture committee to enhance the employee’s relationship and to encourage positive environments within the company. One example of the way the culture committed enhance a positive climate is by doing “Hokey Days”, this is a way for the committee to show support towards the crews that clean and maintain the aircrafts. This is one way in which the culture committee has effectively influenced a culture change and has created norms that member care about.

            The purpose of the culture committee at Southwest is to show camaraderie within the organization and it’s employees. It helps to create an environment where employees are encourage to share ideas regarding what members should do and feel, this sense of cultural norm helps create positive behaviors in the organization (Brown, 2011). Additionally, the behavior exhibit by the employees is a testament to the world-class service offer to consumers. Culture committees can empower employees and help increase morale in the company. I believe my department can greatly benefit from a culture committee like the one described by Southwest airlines. The only time a member of our employee is acknowledged is when they are transferring from the command. We have approach our superior about this and hopefully should see a major change in the future. One idea is to have departmental family trips, where families are encouraged to participate bonding events.

In conclusion, the values of a company and its practices are an important part in the development of the organization culture. As we have seem from the culture committee of Southwest airlines, where culture are created by empowerment and family values, and not through any formal representative forums or structures. This is experience has encourage me to start a departmental culture committee, to better understand how we can increase awareness and motivation in the department.

Brown, D.R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.).Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall

Haasen, A. & G. Shea. (2003). New Corporate Cultures that Motivate. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers

       

     
 

     
 

A630.2.4.RB - 21st Century Enlightenment

The Video titled 21^st Century Enlightenment, by Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA), takes a deeper look at where we were just a few centuries ago, pertaining to enlightenment and where we are now. Taylor (2010) gave us insight on century old values and how they worked for us. Additionally, he addresses the questions: “do these values still work for us?” and “Do they meet the challenges we now face?” An increase in education and innovation has pushed us passed the expectation of forefathers. It has catapulted the millennial generation into an era which daily ideas are changing the values, norms and lifestyle of modern society. 

In the video Taylor (2010) talks about how to live differently you have to think differently?  I believe what Taylor was trying to say is that in order to continue to move towards change we need to see things from a different perspective and not just only from the past. Taylor (2010) explains that to live differently we must respond purposely.  Brown (2011) explains that organizations either become more
adaptive, flexible, and anticipative, or they become rigid and stagnant, reacting to change after the fact and often when it is too late.
Taylor (2010) elaborates on this by stating that most of our behavior is the responses to the world around us, rather than the outcome of conscious decision making.

At one point in the video Taylor (2010) argues that we need "to resist our tendencies to make right or true that which is merely familiar and wrong or false that which is only strange". I believe he is trying to encourage us to expand our empathy’s reach. To elaborate, increasing our own understating not just what everyone else is thinking, and to make our decisions based on facts. In the military, complacency often occurs when the individual losses focus of their goals and objectives and usually follow what the crowd is doing. I saw this during my last deployment and people started to get complacent due to the high tempo. People were eager to get back home and it soon became a popular trend to become complacent with their jobs. Thankfully we had different programs in place to help personnel cope with change and to utilize their support groups, in order to minimize this effect.

Taylor (2010) argues that our society should eschew elements of pop culture that degrade people and that we should spend more time looking into what develops empathetic citizens. This ideology is strong and instrumental change that is needed in today’s society. To have this type of change, people should make the conscious decision for self-awareness and for individuals to take responsibilities for their actions. Is this task possible? Yes, but it’s going to take time and effort from everybody. Great nations weren’t built overnight and leaders are not born but made with diligence and determination. We need to have a mindset of diversity in order to encourage a healthy change where public disagreement is viewed as progress and not as an unhealthy habit of public disparagement (Taylor, 2010).  

At the end of the video, Taylor (2010) talks about atomizing people from collaborative environments and the destructive effect on their growth. This is true to say that in order to reach self-awareness and reach a sense of enlightenment we need to be ready and face change. We must put in the work in the effort to enhance change, and we must work as a team to ensure no one is left behind. 

In conclusion, to move towards change we must know who we are as human beings, have political debates about who we need to become, and have philosophical and spiritual debates of who we might aspire to be. This exercise was informative and eye opening. I hope to have a bigger role in my organization to help influence change and play my part in the bigger picture as an empathetic citizen of the Unites States Of America. I believe in order to create true awareness and enlightenment we must bring into the present what is of value from the past, and leave the rest behind us.

Reference:

Brown, D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Taylor, M. (2010). RSA Animate - 21st Century Enlightenment - YouTube. YouTube. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC7ANGMy0yo&feature=youtube

A630.1.4.RB - Board of Directors

Change is an unstoppable force, which in the twenty-first century, all of us will have to face with increasingly fragmented, rapidly changing, tumultuous conditions. It is important that you become aware of your orientation toward adapting to these conditions (Whetten, Cameron 2011). Brown (2011) illustrates change, as coming down upon us like an avalanche, and most people are utterly unprepared to cope with it. Change is occurring so rapidly that it is a moving target (Brown, 2011).  Effective implementation of change in organizations will require leadership to adapt to the conditions and accept personal responsibility for their actions under changing conditions (Whetten, Cameron 2011).

A great illustration of these concepts of change on how people handle different types of obstacles is the video presentation by Sally Kohl entitled, A Tale of Power & Vision (2007). The video depicts the struggles of a pessimists and pragmatists who seemed to be responsible for holding back or stopping changes within an organization and Power and Vision who encourage innovation and positive change. The video showed how a group of individuals working as a team could overcome adversity. According to Brown (2011), Change is a way of life in today’s organization, but organizations are also faced with maintaining a stable identity and operations in order to accomplish their primary goals.

However, change just for the sake of change is not necessarily effective; in fact, it may be dysfunctional (Brown, 2011). 

In my experience I have seem many changes take place in the military. A good example is the development and distribution of new uniforms to service members. You can only imaging the daunting task to ensure every person is under complete compliance of the order. The latest of these directives were the total overhaul of the Navy’s working uniform. This task was meet with not a lot of enthusiasm and many were reluctant. However, the military has a way of enforcing change, which allows leadership to come up with different ways of implementation. In my squadron, communication was the key to success; leadership was transparent to the change and communicated effectively down the chain of command. The way the leadership handle the situation gave creditability to the Navy. Ultimately, the dateline was meet and the objective was achieved. This example, showed how change can be administer across a large organization, and how much influence leadership has within a group.

In conclusion, we can see that change is going to happen into to keep up with the world development. It is up to leadership to encourage and strengthen their teams to be prepare to tackles the obstacles associated with change.

Reference:

Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organization Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Kohn, S. (uploaded 2007). Board of Directors: A Tale of Power and Vision. YouTube video. Retrieved Aug 14, 2015 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZVIWZGheXY 

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2011). Developing Self-Awareness. In Developing Managment Skills Eighth ed., pp. 57-82). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.