Managerial Communication: content and development

So I have played around with the the blog format and appearance. I thought I would get a vote from everyone on the blog.

Do you like this background and layout?

If you have any interesting images for the upper banner please send them or post them here and I can put them into the banner image.

I am also collecting websites or blogs that deal with organizational communication, which I will add to our blog and allow us to search other courses or blogs in the field of organizational communication. So post them here as well.

I have put up a VOTE HERE photo, that I took on the day of the US presidential election, in symbolic support of Iranians protesting their right to have their vote count.

Suzanne

As I wait for Caryn’s post on the course goals for the future. I thought I would add a few thoughts of my own from our chat.

It still seems as if Technology is an important theme to integrate into COM3068, not just as a theme in of itself but to see how the different org comm theories pass through it or give different viewpoints. I think it is interesting to see how it impacts the workplace socially but also the way work will be changed over the next ten years.

I also like the idea of adding more rhetoric of work and the Parker Follet side. I also like the idea of how the argenti and the clampitt books can still be a part of the course content when used to look at the organization as a whole and how the practice of management is also the way the organization communicates internally and externally. I think though, there is still this back and forth between how much overlap there might be between the business management courses and this course. I would love to see what you think Linda.

I, myself have fought the tendency to bring leadership literature into the course and I feel that this is more prone to the COM3102 course.

But the most important point is… that I am going to take the ACTIVITES PAGE, where I have posted my tests and activities and I am going to PASSWORD protect it. You will all be able to post any activity there, tests, notes, paper topics, etc., and only those who have the password will be able to access it or see it.  I will email you all the password. The reason I am doing this is to open up the blog to RSS feed which will allow us to get information and access to other course blogs and websites dealing with the org comm themes and literature.

This means that the blog will be open to them as well. So only the password protected page will be private.

So there you go big moves to come. But what is even bigger is Caryn’,  soon to come, post on Goals for fall 09….(pressure ;-0)

So, we’re going to start talking about . . .

I don’t know if everyone read the Sunday New York Times’ “Corner Office” interview? Well, Richard Anderson the CEO of Delta Airlines talks about, among other things, the interview process and what he deems important  when he is looking to fill an executive position.

It is right up the “Communication Walkway” (my title), as he talks about communication as a number one element needed in today’s work world. He also talks about people’s personal lives as a key factor to integrating them into the organizational culture. Sound Familiar..?

Here is an extract and the link:

‘He wants subjects, verbs and objects”

“You spend more of your waking time with your colleagues at the office than you do with your family and when you bring someone into that family — we have 50 senior leaders at our company and 70,000 employees — you need to make sure that they’re a fit to the culture. And that they’re going to be part of that group of people in a healthy functioning way.”

There are a lot more juicy statements about the spoken and written word as fundamental in today’s professional world.

Hello Everyone:

I hope this post finds you all well and surviving the semster!

This is a long overdue blog about a recent brainstorming conversation Suzanne, Linda, and I had about 3068. My hope is to share some of my recollections of our conversation and then, Suzanne and Linda please chime in . . .

Bob and Jana, we met in March to continue discussions about the philosophy and goals of 3068 as well as just to ‘compare notes’ and share ideas. Although we haven’t been able to meet again lately, we hope to continue this dialogue.

Part of our conversation was a discussion of the various backgrounds we all bring to our teaching of 3068.

Our backgrounds span the fields of organizational communication (coming from the communication studies discipline), management communication (coming more from management studies), and business communication (a combination of communication studies, management, and english, and others). And, because of this, we all come at the class in ways that are both similar and different.

One way we came to this realization was through a comparison of teaching materials. For example, I use the Miller book, partly because it is written by an organizational communication studies scholar and reflects what i know. Suzanne has used other books in the past, but has been experimenting with Miller as well. Linda’s background and expertise draws her to Argenti’s text, particularly its case study focus and inclusion of crisis communication (one of her specialties).

We have also compared TOCs – there is a great deal of topical overlap between these texts; there are also differences with respect to the theoretical ideas being presented and history of ‘the field’ (as they vary) being presented. We all see strengths in both of these resources.

Yet we also talked about the need to reduce overlap between 3068 and, for example, 3102 as well as the pre-req management classes that are a part of the program. We also talked about the need to continue to develop a course that fully brought together a focus on *communication* with respect to management and organizing. What makes this class different, unique, and/or special in relation to other classes which may also talk about issues of leadership, conflict, etc. in the workplace?

I am putting up (as soon as I send this) a ‘working’ draft of a course philosophy emerging out of these conversations. The goal of this philosophy is for us to come together on some broad goals we want to accomplish in 3068, understanding that we may (probably will) get to these goals differently. Yet they give us some place to start. Please get on to the blog and comment, edit, revise, etc. I’m just putting up a first draft with the expectation that we’ll all add our thoughts in the coming weeks.

We all decided to share ideas via this blog, although we recognize that time is scarce these days. Linda noted that her case study approach is ‘emergent’ by nature but there may be ways for her to help teach Suzanne and I more about doing case studies in the classroom.

I think this is the jist of what I remember from our conversation. Suzanne and Linda, please add in your thoughts. Although time is scare to meet, our hope is that this blog will allow us to interact and continue to share ideas on 3068.

Have a super weekend.

Caryn

So I hear that Jana is back with us and that Linda Lopez and Bob Myers have joined The COM3068 blog. I thought I would take a moment to welcome both Jana back to work and Bob and Linda to the blog and reiterate a few points about the blog and how it might function as a point of reference and discussion about the Managerial Communication course, COM3068.

At this point there are 6 of us connected to this blog. Caryn, Linda, myself, Kevin Wolf (Instructional Technologist), Jana and Bob.  All of us can post, edit and upload documents or other media to this blog. I invite anyone to post their thoughts and reflections on the COM3068 course or just about theories and concepts related to managerial communication in general, or even on teaching and learning.

At this point in time the blog is closed and can only be seen by the six of us. Though I would like to open it to the larger Baruch community I will keep it closed until the general consensus is ready to have it open for others to visit and in return for us to have Feeds and information from other faculty blogs here at Baruch. One issue was that there might be sensitive material or even exams and quizzes that students might be able to see if the blog were no longer password protected. However, for future reference we can password protect various elements or reference pages of the blog and have the rest of the blog open.  This is all for further discussion.

For the moment I want to draw your attention to the right hand upper corner on the blog where it is marked pages. Each one of the Pages are evolving reference spaces where we can go to retrieve information and documents to help teach or research various elements of the COM3068 course. Anyone of us can add to those Pages and or create a new page. All one needs to do is go to Site Admin all the way on the bottom right of the blog home page and click on it. Then put in your password, the one you used when you signed on as  a member of this blog. You will then have the possibility to click on Write a Post or Page. The rest is basically like writing a word document, to add an image or a document there is a small Add Media button on top of the text box. Click on this and jut follow the directions. If anyone has any problems just give me a call.

That’s about all I have to say for now, I am hoping that this is more of an open discussion blog and that it is not me and my direction alone that will guide the use of this blog as a reference for the development of the COM3068 course. Because if it is….We’re in big trouble…:)

The above image is a computer generated image of the Internet and all of its varying world wide web connections…

Jana has sent in a few choice articles from the web on corporations and social media. There is a most interesting longitudinal study on the increase in top performing private companies’ use of social media as a major part of their marketing and business strategies (Social Media in the Inc. 500). There is another interesting study in the amount of time people are now watching online videos. This has also increased at a rapid pace. Time spent watching Video… I will post both of these articles under the Technology Corner.

I think though we need to find some research on how all of this social media effects the individual in the workplace and even work itself…

So Linda has sent in an article on Twitter, State of the Art, already putting us into the heart of the trend in media discussions- is Twitter really important? Is it the next “thing”? Or is it just another talk about me, me, and me?

The question then becomes is this a part of Organizational Communication, will companies and or institutions begin to use twitter to produce better work habits, better communication or just more employees having personal time at the work place?

I can certainly say that at The Schwartz Institute two of my colleagues are on twitter all day long and use it as a networking tool and a get the information first tool. The networking side is great, we have already found out other similar centers and staff and other universities doing similar work as our selves. Just being able to get their feedback and their resources has been helpful as well as giving the Institute new recognition in our field.

I however feel the get the news before everyone else part of the twitter tool is a sort of adolescent stress; did you know, so and so told me, noooo really?!

Any thoughts?

So we are off to our new start, a new semester, where I will not be teaching and Linda is now joining us as one of the thinkers and shapers of the Managerial Communication Course. Though I will not be teaching this semester, I am committed to doing research and posting information and ideas for the course. I also will push all of us to post ideas and teaching experiences so this can be a community project, not just each one of us alone in our corners trying to do the “right” thing.

I have started a new Page on technology where anyone using this blog can go to look up articles on organizations and technology. “Pages” are located on the upper right corner of the blog home page and are  reference areas to find research, articles, chapters, and URL links all of which in someway relate to Managerial Communication. The definition of how they relate to the course is open to interpretation, so do not feel compelled to just post or link credible information. It can be something that just makes us think or laugh as well.

Last semester Caryn and I had talked a great deal about how IT and communication is a new field of study in Managerial Communication and that it will probably keep growing as an area of interest to students and scholars alike. So I will look into some of the work out there and hopefully post a few interesting pieces. And again feel free to add to the collection in any of the Pages.

I would like to suggest to everyone that we begin to link our blog to other blogs dealing with some of the same faculty development questions. In order to do that we will have to take off the password protection, meaning anyone who wishes to see out blog will be able to do so, in short open to the world. Yet to see it someone will have to actually search for it, as we can make it only available at Baruch and not on a google search engine. I will let you all think about it, but I want to hold up the idea of how this is one of the new uses in IT and organizations; how do we work in a format that is semi public? Many educational institutions are beginning to look at these questions, IT now allows the transmission and development of knowledge across the world. So how do leaders, teachers and researchers continue to work and teach yet use the far reaching elements of this new IT communication world?

This is all just food for thought….

So I gave the last class today and I am feeling some mixed emotions about the course this year and mainly my teaching of it. I had a discussion with the students as to how the course was organized and what choice of content was used.

I organized the course in 3 main components, the first being rhetoric and how society has viewed work and labor through the ages and how that relates to today’s globalized workplace. The students then had to write a paper in relation to these concepts and the readings in the course. I wrote an earlier post on this part of the course.  This was a very successful part of the course and the students all agreed during today’s discussion that it was an interesting way to have an over view of the course material to come, and to think about organizations, work and labor as a whole.

The second part of the course was the different theories in organizational communication. I stuck very much to the textbook and went over chapters and lead discussions on examples of the theory in real life situations as well as having the students reading articles and case studies. The students then wrote a 5 page paper applying one of the theories to a case study or an observation in their own organization. I am not fully satisfied with  the way in which I taught and organized this particular component to the course.

The students seemed to like the general way in which the course  went over each theory by itself and then tried to apply it through case studies and articles. But they felt there was way too much theory and that they were overwhelmed at the end. This was demonstrated in an almost 70% failure rate on the mid term quiz.

I would like to rethink this 2nd part of the course and try to make it more functional to the course and the students.

The third and last component was ‘People’; emotion, diversity and the individual in the workplace. I followed some of Caryn’s guidelines for this final part pf the course. The students were very interested and I had  some up-to-date research articles which really worked well, ( I have put them in the reading resources pages). I would have liked to delve more into this area and I think the class would have benefited. However there was not enough time and I am thinking of ways to introduce this component earlier in the semester. But in truth there is never enough time. I also think I should have had  a paper that related to this particular area of content. I had the students do an expanded version of the 2nd paper. but I think now it would have worked better to do another 5 page paper on the third and last content component of the course.

So, I now want to advocate for fewer theories and will seek input from the other Managerial Communication faculty to see which theories are considered to be fundamental to Organizational Communication and which can be left for “Further Reading.”  I also want to examine the quizzes and exams; how can they be easier for the students to learn form as well as standards from which to evaluate the course direction.

I liked teaching this course and I like many of the changes we implemented for this pilot semester. I really continue to advocate for the rhetoric component; I think it starts off the course with a much more conceptual look at the content and the subject matter and I believe it helps the student move into a more academic-critical thinking mode from the very beginning of the semester.

The students were generally very pleased with the course, and I received a round of applause when I told them that I was expecting to see all of them in 5-10 years inviting us -COM3068 faculty-to the companies or political campaigns they have created to give talks and seminars. You see, I am getting some future work for us all.