As Good as it Gets

I am taking an honors section of Organizational Behavior this semester with Laurie Levesque. It is an experienced-based (XB) teaching and learning style and is far from your conventional class. In order to learn how individuals behave in an organization and to develop management skills, the class is being run as an organization. This may be confusing, I know. Our entire class is still trying to figure it out. Our textbook isn't really a textbook, but a manual and it even states that we will be very confused.

So basically, the class (organization) is divided up into four different departments: Doing, Observing, Responsibility and Understanding. And then within the departments, there are various teams with specific jobs and job responsibilities. I work in the Understanding Department for the Formal Organization team. My job, along with my teammate, is to make sure the organization understands the formal structure and power of organizations as well as the theories and concepts we are learning in the class.

One interesting component of XB (what we call the class) is that the professor takes a very minimal role. This forces us to run the organization on our own an to learn and apply the concepts and theories in the text to our experiences in the classroom. We aren't even allowed to refer to her as "Professor" or "Doctor." Her official title is "Senior Manager."

I could go on to explain more, but I think it would just confuse you. Anyway, in order to learn how to distinguish good work from not so good work, to learn objectivity and to learn the ability to justify a decision, we have to write a weekly memo to the organization. Then it is the job of four members of the class each week (one from each department) to rank the memos from best to worst. This forces us to analyze the quality of a piece of work and justify why we ranked it where we did. Although the Senior Manager reads all the memos each week, it is essentially up to the students to rank and grade the memos. And those grades actually count.

What is kind of exciting is that I ranked as the number one memo for the first week! Not only did my classmates like my writing, but even the Senior Manager told me after class that my memo was impressive. It feels like a real accomplishment to not only have ranked as number one in an honors class, but to have been ranked by my peers. Maybe that means I'll make a good manager one day :)

I ran into one of my classmates in Barnes & Noble and we were discussing various things about XB. She said that she was reading my work and listening to me in class and that she hopes to learn how to better observe team members in XB from my example. I was so honored and yet taken aback by her comment. But it really is kind of cool that I am learning life skills and management skills in one of my classes through experience, and not just theories and concepts. And that someone is able to learn something from me, and I in turn will be able to learn from others is an incredible thing!

So then yesterday I had a presentation in my Management Information Systems class. It's not really the most exciting class ever. I'm not into technology and computers and such, so learning all about Information Technology is not my cup of tea. But the professor does try to make it interactive. Anyway, our presentation rocked. Afterwards the professor told us that we had "great slides", "great confidence" and we got a 10 out of 10. He also said, "You were as good as it gets!"

Now how about that for a good Wednesday :)