Organizational Diversity, Essay Example

Task 1 :  Weekly Journal

The key points in this weeks reading on Organizational diversity focused upon  how Administrators of Schools would benefit motivation and solicitation of meaningful feedback.  In the relationship of Administrators with Teaching staff, there is a need to consider these facets if you are to influence desired behavioural changes.  As such to influence behavioural changes in Teachers you need to place such requests in a format they understand and provide appropriate inducements.  For example you might tell a Teacher that he/she is a poor communicator.  Another approach might be to suggest the concept of a “Newsletter” and offer help in the publication and distribution of same.

We also examined the concept of diversity in the School organization.  The concept of defining community and the roles that people play who are located in it.  Of particular interest was the concept concerning ” A village of one hundred” , the shrunken Earth concept with a diverse small ethnic group of 100 people; of the entire population only 1 had a University Education.  Teachers who are teaching internationally become enriched by being exposed to a diverse range of people and organizational cultures. The challenge for the future is truly on a global scale with an imperative of Teachers having the ability to Educate a diverse range of students with different beliefs and cultural backgrounds

The concept of diversity is clearly evident in the class student population and the range of varying opinions and values provides for a more stimulating and far reaching learning environment.

Task 2 :  School Principal Interview

What is the most challenging part of your job as it pertains to collaborating with the Community and your Staff ?

Both of these are represented as key Stakeholders to the School.  Both have different value sets and expectations from the School.  My job is to balance these with the constraints imposed by the School Governing Board and Regional Education Authorities.  We only have a finite number of resources, we have limited funding as defined by our Annual Budget Statement.  Equally, we have to adhere to certain regulations and policies. It is my job to communicate these realities to both the Community and Staff to ensure that they fully understand the modus operandi of the school.  Both stakeholders are an important and integral part of the decision making authority of the School and as such they need to understand and appreciate the holistic values of the School. In this regard we seek a consensus decision but as the elected Principal I have to arbitrate the final decisions.

As the School expands and diversifies it increases the number of Stakeholders with vested interests. This in turn creates even more variations in opinions and values.  All of this is placed into a manageable framework but we do lose some degree of flexibility as we move more towards adoption of standards and uniform codes of practice.  We do however, make every effort to align our philosophical beliefs to accomplishments by clear interpretation of our mission and goals.

What is your greatest satisfaction related to working collaboratively with the community and instructional staff?

I enjoy working with a highly professional, motivated and committed teaching staff.  They are fully supportive of the Schools philosophical aims and the implementation of the goals to support our mission statement.  We have a very close collaborative working relationship in terms of getting the best from our budget and limited resource portfolio.  We have divergences of opinion but these are normally constructive and helpful debates for the betterment of the school and advancement of instruction.  On most issues we reach consensus but at times as Head I have to make the final decision, hopefully after careful evaluation of both sides of the argument.

We have learnt to listen to the voice of the community and we have an active joint set of initiatives in order to improve communications.  We are particularly pleased with the School Newsletter, our newly created website that is updated monthly and the regular social mixers where we integrate members of the community with the Teaching staff.  This provides an open forum for discussion and exchange of ideas.  Most importantly as an Educational facility we are also here to learn and seek ongoing improvements in communications and relationships with all of our key stakeholders.

What advice can you offer to a future new Administrator about collaborating with the internal and external school community and implementing instructional changes ?

With the internal staff the main objectives should be to provide constructive feedback. In this sense it is important to work with the teaching staff to gain a firm grounding and understanding of their business environment. Good synergistic working is based upon mutual collaboration and respect.  When seeking change it is important to seek consensus as only by having joint “buy in” to the proposed change solutions will you truly be able to implement them.  Another aspect is that of gaining mutual trust. Both sides need to have confidence in one another. Objectives should be realistic and achievable. They should not be geared towards political agendas and in particular refrain from adopting secret agendas. Betrayal of trust is serious as once breached it is difficult to re-establish and it will almost certainly contaminate the opinion of others.

With the external school community it is really about two main things: (1) Effective Listening – Become an empathatic listener take time to understand peoples issues and concerns. Ensure that they are heard and work with them in problem resolution. Again this is about gaining their trust and support in attainment of school objectives (2) Be a fluent communicator – the need to communicate widely and be as inclusive as possible. Ensure all interested parties are included within the communications strategy. Try to think from a holistic perspective as opposed to a narrow field of vision.

In so far as implementation is concerned it is necessary to build a logical framework that is easily understood, capable of planned measurement and inclusive of timelines. You need to identify the action steps to build into this framework.  These might be considered the goals that you want to achieve. For example:

1. Build and conduct a needs assessment
2. Obtain Administrative Support
3. Secure Funding
4. Select Leadership Team

These will vary according to individual need but the concept is the same for any situation. Once you have identified the goals, populate with the tasks that need to be implemented in order to achieve these goals.  These are the measurable items.  It is useful to indicate milestones or the important target date for completion of items.  This can be demonstrated by a simple timeline diagram as illustrated below:

Visual communications are important as they are easier to discuss when presenting fairly complex issues and it enables each person to have the same view and interpret data in a consistent manner.

Conclusions

So in summing up the content of the job I would determine that the following are considered the most challenging and rewarding aspects.

1. Effective Stakeholder Management – Ensuring a level of inclusivity over all interested parties in the school values chain.  This includes a wide and diverse group of people. It is necessary to retain a holistic approach that primarily embraces the School Philosophy, Mission and its’ goals.
2. Communications – Ensure that we maintain an effective communications policy to both the media and our stakeholders. This is accomplished by regular bulletins, newsletters and the frequent update of the school website.  The latter is a particularly powerful communications medium as we have a chat room for online discussion and Q&A sessions.  We also allow bloggs from our students, teachers and other interested parties, thereby allowing a free flowing channel of communications.
3. Diversity –  We have a diverse ethnic population at the School reflected in both our student and teaching staff.  We enjoy an excellent exchange of cultural values and information. In addition we have exchange visits with Colleges overseas and also arrange vacation voluntary work overseas. All of these enable our students a rich range of diversity in their education.
4. Collaboration – We have learnt the true value of group dynamics and how effective collaboration adds value to our decision making and planning process. A part of this is empathetic learning and good listening skills – we have learnt to listen to our stakeholders and embrace their points of view.  This has improved both our vision for the school and development of the planning objectives.
5. Implementation Planning –  We have embraced technology to help improve our planning process. We capture all of our base information in a spreadsheet and structure this into a logical planning framework.  This is then exported into a planning tool that enables us to assign resources, manage costs and track the progress of our events.  We are able to take snapshots of key development activities and then export these graphs directly into our Newsletters. This powerful means of software interactivity has considerably streamlined our administrative process in a number of key areas.