Program Goal J
The MMLIS program recognizes that information professionals spend most of their time accomplishing their goals through team-based and collaborative projects. The courses of the MMLIS program provide a combination of leadership, interpersonal and communication theory with skill development to improve one’s ability to lead high performing teams (Patton, 2019). This program goal requires understanding communication and leadership practices, leading different teams, and accomplishing successful, diverse projects.
I gained competency in this program goal by leading many diverse teams throughout my time in the MMLIS program. I was not just a team leader for class projects, but also the elected President of USC’s ALA Student Chapter (ALASC). I also gained competency in this program goal by learning leadership theory and applying what I learned while I led my teams on projects. Additionally, I learned how important it was to communicate with people of different backgrounds and to motivate individuals with different productivity styles. On the teams I led, we accomplished writing and presenting business documents, presenting an implementation project, and developed monthly newsletters containing diverse, informative pieces, and planning monthly club events.
I also gained competency in this program goal during GSBA520: Business Fundamentals for Non-Business Professionals. During this course, I worked on an assignment called “Teamwork and Culture” where I identified the five conditions of effectiveness between teams and evaluated how my current work team ranked. By evaluating the team with the five conditions, I recognized the reasons why our team did not function or communicate well. I recognized that our team was able to get tasks done, but we did not work well together. This assignment also showed me that our team did not have a compelling direction or an effective team structure. Additionally, organization policies would constantly change, and leadership was not supportive in the transition. I demonstrate my competency in this program goal as I show my understanding of communication and leadership behaviors that affect workplace performance.
I also demonstrate competency in this program goal during GSBA502: Management Communication for Leaders. For this class, I recorded a short video where I present an idea to form a new problem-solving network for Amazon’s IT Support organization. Amazon’s IT Support was a large, vertical organization of about 500 engineers that supported all the teams and departments and other employees within Amazon corporate offices in North America. IT Support had ongoing issues with communication, standardization of policies, and centralized resources. These issues were affecting the IT engineers’ ability to help employees at Amazon effectively. In this video, I described the need for networking within the large IT Support organization and I proposed to build a network of engineers that could help solve some of the communication and standardization issues of IT support. I described how forming this network of engineers could improve customer support within Amazon. This assignment demonstrates my competency in this program goal as this video shows how I lead diverse projects, understanding communication, and leadership behaviors and I propose a solution that positively affects workplace performance and client satisfaction.
I further demonstrate my competency in this program goal by applying effective communication and leadership behaviors I learned as the acting President of ALASC. Once I was elected as President, I decided to implement a Team Charter. The ALASC Team Charter is a document where we list the team’s goals for the year and how we were going to disperse responsibilities among the team members. The team charter is an effective communication practice as it is a written document where everyone agrees to their responsibilities and team goals. This way, we were all aware of what our goals were for the semester. The Team Charter helped us know what was expected of us and to do our best to accomplish our individual and team goals. I believe writing the Team Charter has helped the ALASC team accomplish our numerous goals of releasing a monthly newsletter to the students and by hosting monthly virtual events where we have experienced record amounts of new attendees. The Team Charter also forces the team to always pull their weight and do their assigned tasks in a timely manner. This accountability is effective in preventing one team member from doing all the work and feeling overwhelmed or burnt out. As we are working together as a team, ALASC has accomplished our goals to host successful events where more students participate. The “Team Charter” demonstrates my competency of this program goal as I have applied effective communication and leadership behaviors while I led ALASC. The application of the behaviors has positively affected our team’s performance and hopefully enhanced the satisfaction of the students of the MMLIS program.
The MMLIS program recognizes that information professionals spend most of their time accomplishing their goals through team-based and collaborative projects. I demonstrated my competency in this program goal in my “Teamwork and Culture” assignment, where I identified the five conditions of effectiveness between teams and evaluated how my current team ranked. I further demonstrate my competency in this program goal in the “Building a problem-solving network at Amazon” video, where I show my understanding of communication and leadership behaviors and I propose a solution that affects workplace performance and client satisfaction. Lastly, I demonstrate my competency in managing diverse projects and team and understanding communication and leadership behaviors that affect workplace performance and client satisfaction by creating the Team Charter for ALASC. By using the team charter, the team is aware of the expectations and goals of the school year, and thus, we all work on accomplishing the goals on the charter.
Reference
Patton, G. 2019. GSBA502: Management Communication for Leaders [Syllabus]. Los Angeles, CA. Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. https://ia801407.us.archive.org/29/items/gsba502-communication-for-leaders-syllabus/GSBA502_SU19_Syllabus.pdf
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