Prompt #1:  What did you learn about organizations, and/or the behavior of individuals within an organization?  How do the ideas presented in Part Five (the Symbolic Frame) of the B&D textbook enrich your understanding of the ways in which organizations and the people working in them function?

I learned the importance of having fun in the work place.  I have always felt like it was an important thing to do, but now I have a lot more proof of its importance.  “Humor plays a number of important roles: it integrates, expresses skepticism, contributes to flexibility and adaptiveness, and lessens status differences.” (Bolman and Deal page 263) A lot of people feel that the workplace should be a serious place, and that humor and fun have no place there, but our text shows us how it actually can help improve the workplace in so many ways, like allowing people to destress, allowing people to vent some frustrations but in a joke as opposed to in an angry or hurtful way, and it breaks up the monotony of the day to day work.

 

Prompt #2:  How can you apply the concepts that you have learned about in the readings to your personal or organizational life?  Be specific.

I really loved the example of Zappos, in fact I have read about Zappos and Southwest in so many of my leadership classes, I would really like to find a job at one of these organizations.  Anyway, the examples of Zappos and the “culture of happiness” that they have started there is what I aspire to make my team feel.  “Employees carrying cowbells and noisemakers lead spontaneous office parades in costume.  Departments sponsor cookouts and other fun events throughout the year.  Managers are required to spend 10-20 percent of their hours ‘goofing off’ with employees.  Managers and employees are encouraged to fraternize outside of normal office hours.” (Bolman and Deal page 246)  What a great culture and fun place to work.  These are the ideas that I want to start implementing.  I already do some things with my team outside of work, but I am careful to draw a line, and make sure that there is never something that would make me lose my image to them as a leader.  I would like to start having more cookouts or potluck lunches, just to get everyone involved, even if there is nothing to celebrate.  And I am really interested in the goofing off time.  I used to have a manager who hung a small basketball over the front door of the bank, and when there was no customers inside the lobby, we would play.  At an event outside the bank, myself and some of my other teammates were really enjoying playing the bean bag game where you have to get them into the hole to make points.  I want to make something like that, something we can be silly with on our down time, just to break up the day and the boringness of work.

 

Prompt #3:  Take a look at the Week 5 Video Clips content area.  It’s your turn to talk about your life and any meaningful personal connections you care to make about the symbolic frame.  Comment on your life, the videos, and whatever connections strike your fancy!

I highlighted a section under the heading of Stories and Fairy Tales that said “We denigrate professors and elders for telling ‘war stories.’ Yet stories convey information, morals, and myths vividly and convincingly.  They perpetuate values and keep heroic feats alive.” (Bolman and Deal page 253) I liked this section because it did hit home for me.  For about a year and a half I worked in a banking center where my average aged client was 80.  It was a change for me, I was used to fast pace centers with clients looking to get in and out.  Not here, these people liked to come in and grab a cup of coffee and chat.  It was an adjustment.  And there were days where I would sit to these elderly people tell me the same stories over and over and they would drive me crazy, but I realize now that I learned something from so many of their stories.  Whether it was stories about how they met their husbands, or the first job these women ever had, or losing their spouse, all of their stories taught me something about how I wanted to live my life or how I wanted to be when I was older.  I now appreciate those stories, but sometimes in the moment it is hard to do so. 

 

Prompt #4:  Throughout your progression in the Organizational Leadership program, you have had a number of courses that include content complementary to the Symbolic frame.  Please highlight what you would consider to be two of the most important things (ideas, concepts, theories, models, processes, skills, etc.) that you have learned in previous coursework that you can relate to the Symbolic frame.  Briefly discuss each key learning, the course where you learned it, and its connection with the Symbolic Frame. 

Outside of the Organizational Leadership coursework, I needed an upper level class, so I picked one called Sex and the City.  It was not really what I thought it would be, but it was about women and what things have framed where we are today as a gender.  We talked about things like Barbie, Miss America Pageants, and Playboy and how these things may create a negative stereotype for women.  I may not have agreed with a lot of the things we talked about in that class, but there were a lot of metaphors and talks about rituals that may have caused setbacks for women over the years.

My Diversity and Organizations class also had a lot of symbolic frame references.  We talked about the differences between people, sex, race, and culture and celebrating those differences.  We went over how different people may come from different backgrounds, they may have different rituals or traditions that we are not aware of. Story telling was a big part of that class, because that is how we were taught to learn about people’s differences in order to embrace them.

 

Prompt #5:  How do matters that pertain to the Symbolic Frame work in an organization with which you are affiliated?  What sorts of symbols, myths, stories, heroes or rituals, etc. exist and what is their impact?  What is the organizational culture (even if you are talking about a family or team)?

In my family, traditions and rituals are very important.  It is something my mom started really, her mom had a few traditions, but my mom went to Texas A&M and they have a lot of traditions there, and ever since then, she has implemented them into her own life and instilled into myself and my brother growing up.  My mom has always made a big deal about her Christmas tree.  She has a very large tree with tons of ornaments, and they aren’t the regular ball ornaments you can buy in the store, but every time she goes out of town, on vacation, or has an important event in her life she buys something or makes an ornament to hang on the tree. Then on December 9th, my family gets together and decorates the tree.  We don’t do it until the 9th because my dad’s birthday is the 8th and when he was growing up his mom always just combined Christmas and his birthday so my mom likes to make a point to make 2 separate events.  The tradition with the big unique Christmas tree has been passed onto me, now that I have my own house, I get a bigger tree every year as I get more personalized ornaments from my life.  Because my mom has always put such an emphasis on certain traditions, it has influenced my husband and I to start our own traditions too.  It is nice to have something that is special just to us, that we can do to celebrate or to have our own ritual that we can pass on to our kids someday.  I just feel like it is really special, and it is the traditions and rituals that bring us closer together, and give us a special bond.

 

Prompt #6:  Additionally, with respect to your organization, identify a metaphor for “as it is” and “as it might become”.  Discuss this briefly. 

 I was very touched by the video of the dancer who danced her way through cancer.  Even though she was struggling and suffering, her dancing was her passion and was what she wanted to be able to do so she pushed herself to do it until it wasn’t such a struggle anymore.  In my work place, I relate this to my experience as being a new branch manager at Bank of America.  I got hired by one person and within two weeks my boss had changed.  Honestly, had I been interviewed by this woman I might not have taken the job.  The new boss was micromanaging, controlling, and unreasonable.  For the first few months, I really hated my job, I was miserable.  I had to make some decisions about what I was going to do.  I started trying to run my branch the way that I thought was best.  The more I did that, the more my boss backed off, the more she started to see that I did know what I was doing, and she relinquished some control.  I ran my branch the way that I wanted to be lead, and in turn it kind of happened for me.  It is not quite the same as the dancer with cancer, but it is similar.