Organizational Leadership

The Organizational Leadership course provided me with the leadership knowledge to use multiple perspectives to widen one’s worldview.  A prism metaphor as a leadership tool proved instructive to help see how my own self-embedness limited my ability to create a progressive-positive learning environment for my team to grow.  Carey’s five frames methodology was critical into my own self-awareness to unearth company resources to make critical process improvements in the commission administration process.  I learned that to be effective, a leader must strive to balance the truth of all five frames into a holistic vision.   

Organizational Theory

Building upon the knowledge of metaphors and the use of multiple frame thinking, this course taught me the importance of corporate brand and corporate values to increase effectiveness and drive employee engagement.   Corporate values and corporate identity need to be embedded throughout the corporate culture to sharpen decision making.  During our ESPN group project I discovered the use of symbolic story-telling as an impactful tool of effective leadership communication.  Story-telling as a symbolic communication device has the ability to make those intangible corporate values and mission feel tangible to employees.  This powerful means of communication will engage employees and inspire future performance. 

Organizational Communication

The learnings from Organizational Communication followed through on the insights I gained from the effectiveness of storytelling.  ORGL505 course continued to build my communication leadership skills by leading a communication audit project of the sales commission administration and sales commission design process.  Starting with the corporate climate survey that indicated that trust was lagging within the administration leadership team, the communication audit found gaps in communication between the human capital (design) and finance (administration) that lead to unforced errors.  This course and project helped me to create a proposal to improve communication, improve trust and build  effective relationships between all sales incentive stakeholders    

Leadership and Diversity

Leadership and diversity was an Aha! course.  My leadership shadow took on an informed awareness that our identities are formed in part by the social class we are born into, our gender and how society sees us in these roles.  This social constructivism has implications on the direction of our lives. This course also taught me to seek to understand the perspective of another and the importance of empathic listening as a means to guide and lead each team member through their unique life journey.  I attempt bring to work every day an appreciation and understanding that the worldviews of others brings a rich creative dynamic to the workplace that allow humans to flourish.    

Negotiation and Conflict

This course taught me how to embrace conflict and use it as a form of transformation in building relationships.  The dynamics of conflict bring together the differing perceptions, needs and values of the parties. Through the use of moral imagination a leader can aspire to transform the relationship to bring healing and justice to the parties in conflict. Understanding healing, forgiveness and justice can lead to the kind of robust and resilient relationships that build the foundation of legitimate power, both personally and professionally.  In the course we used the leadership tools called conflict maps to help us navigate the Arizona Copper Miner strike of 1983.  This course like so many Gonzaga ORGl course required deep-thinking, over-coming my own self-embedness to produce change that is sustainable and holistic.

Servant Leadership

The Servant Leadership model began the internalization process in my leadership studies that deep transformation is required if I am to effectively inspire others to become leaders themselves.  This deep transformation is not situational but a permanent and humbling change of the heart. The Gonzaga program is about seeing worldviews in order to open up the moral imagination that resides in each of us.  To have this ability requires a leader to practice deep discernment and practice active listening and to lead with a servant’s heart.  In this course we learned critical leadership skills such as, listening, transformation, moral intelligence, and reflection and studied the transformative leaders who embodied these leadership skills.   

Methods of Organizational Research

This course was a mental transition course that taught me how to flex my thinking from being a consumer of knowledge to a producer of knowledge.  Through the use of the Literature Review the course taught me how to refine my rationale and research questions that led me to producing my Capstone project to further research Susan Cain’s topic on how introverted personality types are effective leaders.

Organizational Development

As a compensation consultant this course informed my consultative approach to the business leaders with whom I partner with – most importantly- how to influence without authority.  A key learning is the knowledge that flawless consulting requires the consultant to be authentic with the client through-out their relationship. Being authentic in order to positively impact leadership means you are actively processing information, open to new ideas and insights and being sensitive to context.  This course taught me the value of mindfulness and impacted my confidence to reach-out to multiple business leaders to seek their unique insight on how to design a sales incentive plan that supports their business objectives of net growth, NPS and Star Rating scores. 

Organizational Ethics

Organizational ethics provided an ethical decision-making model that outlined sequential steps to guide leaders in a systematic examination of ethical dilemmas.  The model contains both description and prescription methodologies where leaders describe the current dilemma and then proceed to provide possible solutions.  The model provides a concrete way of contemplating very difficult ethical questions.  As a leader with the Boy Scouts of America, I used the model to understand the ethical issue of LGBT serving as BSA leaders.  Borrowing from the moral imagination concepts learned earlier, I charted out the possible alternative solutions with the corresponding positive and negative consequences to help “see again” a solution that upholds the BSA core values. 

Imagine, Create, Lead

The course challenged me to practice the concepts of effective leadership that we have learned in the ORGL program so that we may begin to learn to see and then to see again.  The practice(s) I have undertaken to nurture my heart and facilitate seeing again is emotional intelligence. This is a concrete step that the practice of mindfulness has help me discover the dark-side of my leadership style. Emotional intelligence will help let go patterns from my voice of cynicism (VOC), and towards opening my heart to see new ways of seeing.   As I continue to work on emotional intelligence I begin to see higher levels of efficacy, hope, optimism and resilience in my leadership style.  This in turn has increased creative performance through new sales incentive programs such as Champions Club and now being involved in Leadership Development programs. 

Leadership in Human Resources

This course explored the Human Resource concepts of recruiting, training, performance management, compensation, labor relations and legislations.  The course reaffirmed my understanding that the face of Human Capital is changing in the corporate business world to one that is a collaborative business partner that consults with business leaders as an organizational change agent.  From this perspective and in my role as compensation consultant I blended the use of a balanced scorecard into the sales incentive plans and sales reporting function to help support the sales organization business objectives around compliance, NPS, star rating and net growth.   

Leadership Seminar

The Leadership Seminar is the ORGL program capstone course.  This course required deep reflection on my ORGL journey by developing a portfolio that presents evidence of key learnings and leadership concepts obtained in Gonzaga’s Organizational Leadership Program.  The development of this leadership portfolio that illustrates my leadership philosophy, core compentencies along with a final leadership project are the outcomes of this course.