A Career Management Reflective Report

The so-called career management, refers to the professional staff behaviors’ guideline that a organization for its employees. Career management is engaged in improve the staff’s career efficiency so that the organization long-term development can be guaranteed. From organizational perspective, career management including the plans, instructions and control for employee’s occupations demands the effective organic integration of organizational perspectives personal development (Gerald, 2009).

Through participating in university career programs and summarizing the career management workbook, I make the following analyses on career management which are my reflection outcomes.

When the job-seekers come to become formal employees of a company, the company should help them formulate and implement the employees’ career plans with a receptive attitude towards their coming. Career management as a course of organizing staff conducts can be understood from three aspects:

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Firstly, career management brings career development plans to its employees and is different from the career plans made by staff themselves. Career management is based on the consideration of the perspective of the organization. It regards staff as special fixed and value-added capital through continual exploiting and investing. Career management embodies characteristics of guidance and utilitarian since it aims at seeking organization sustainable development through staff’s efforts.

Secondly, career management needs to meet both the individual needs and organizational needs. Only by fully understanding of the staff’s career development needs, companies can be able to formulate corresponding policies and measures for helping staff find their own right answers and provide them appropriate opportunities. Similarly, only through meeting the occupational needs of the employees, the organization can be able to meet its own internal value-added needs of human resources. One hand, the improvement of staff’s professional skills can enhance the overall quality level of human resource; the other hand, career management can bring effective and positive incentives to the organizational staff whose career direction is consistent with the organizational development direction, and reserve human resource of high level executives or technicians. Improve overall organizational competitiveness and reserve effective human resource is essential to a company’s development. The energetic and financial investment on career management is can be regarded the long term investment to achieve the goal above. Organizational needs are the dynamic source of career management; if the organizational needs cannot be satisfied, the career management will lose its motivation source and then get terminated. The career management of staffs is the basis of career management and if the basic career needs of staffs cannot be satisfied then the overall career management activities will fail.

Thirdly, the range of career management is broad and involves a lot of topics. It can be said that all the activities which are helpful for staff’s career development should be listed in the scope of career management, shown as follows: For individual employees, such as various types of training, development consulting, counseling, work-family ties, lectures, and the facilities that are for strengthening staffs’ skills and improving their academic qualifications, etc. For the organization’s various personnel policies and measures, such as standardized career appraisal system, establishment and implementation of effective internal promotion system, labor protection and social security system, and so on.

2. A student conference reflective report.

This reflective report is based on my experiences of attending a business conference that is about how to use an e-commerce strategy to adapt the changes in market for a family enterprise. The following is what I leant from that conference.

To organize and hold a meeting, firstly the chairman of that conference needs to set up a clear goal of that meeting. The conference can clearly be used to explore and tackle some issues in the process of management. While the goal of that conference aims at offering effective solutions to solve those issues, then the information flow of effective solutions can correctly reach the practical side of management in the implementation process. For any commercial company, to make a conference valuable demands setting up a clear conference goal. In that conference I attended, since there was a clear goal for dealing with the changes in market for a family enterprise, the goal of the conference was quite clear to every student. Secondly, sufficient information and data are needed to be collected and analyzed. Information collection and analysis is extremely important, which includes an organization’s weakness and threats, strength and opportunities. For that conference I attended, the threat was derived from the analysis of market shares changes that was resulted from competitors’ new strategy. Thirdly, a well-conceived plan should be formulated. Whether Gantt chart or progress schedule is used, either of them should include all the details of the meeting. This effectively promotes the improvement of conference efficiency. Fourthly, a strict management should be carried out on the meeting. As conducting on-site management, strict control must be operated on the items listed in the progress plan. Any items’ omission may result in the failure of conference and the person who is responsible for holding the conference should have the flexibility in dealing with sudden changes. Fifthly, clear and correct communication is essential. If the participants do not understand internal plans, procedures, or back-up work, then how can they understand all of the conference contents in during the shortest possible time duration? Thus clear and correct communication is the key to the success of conference topics. Sixthly, pursuing excellence but perfect; for any meeting of different scales, the best conference plan cannot be perfect so that most important thing during the conference is to recommend, design and amend for the plans. Seventhly, in the end of the conference, a detailed summary is needed. A successful conference requires creative planning, active negotiation and communication skills, standard operation and time management. After the conference, the attendant should sum up how much values he offered, what the investment income comes from, etc. To collect all these answers then apply them to the next conference. In that conference I attended, I think I made a contribution to the conference that is how effectively implement e-commerce strategy within Asian family enterprises.

But for the above seven points that deserve paid attention, the following also should be noticed: those people who attend the conference should not speak endless during the conference and the conference audience should not be picky on the lecturers. Or else, the conference will not be finished during the time limitation and the conference topic will be distracted by other things. That is all my reflection from attending that students’ business conference.

3. A team dynamics reflective report

Group is a type of social interactive organization that follows and shares some common norms. The group has its own objective and its development process is dynamic. How to eliminate the conflicts between groups and then form group power, are much significant to help group achieve its objective. The essence of human life is group. Group is also the foundation of social life. Group offers its members the opportunities to communicate with each other. The constant conflicts and reconciliation occurred inside the group in past are the basis of group consensuses (Alessia, 2009). Those consensuses can produce joint force that is called group dynamic for the group. Group dynamic is used to describe and explore the various behavioral phenomena existed inside the organization. The behavioral phenomena include group formation, structure, relations, members’ interaction, operation, communication, goal achievement, leadership, decision-making, cooperation and conflict, performance, power, etc.

To be more specific, I will focus my reflection on the individuals of group. Each member has his own personality and some of them are hard to get along with. So are the differences, stress and anxiety inside group undermining the group strengths or offering an essential energy source for the group? Obviously the answer is the later one. Most people want to have harmonious relationships with others in order to ensure successful completion of the work, but this does not meet the needs of group dynamics. The members with special skills and fighting spirit may be the most valuable group members. Even though those people may be very difficult to deal with and their views may be unacceptable, yet they or their views may inspire others’ inspiration, which is quite helpful for the organization innovation. If the group lacks of diverse skills, no matter how the members’ relationships are harmonious the loss of lacking creativity cannot be compensated.

The main areas of group action process include communication, multi-influencing, tasks, functions, decisions, atmosphere and emotions (Mark, 2010). Once a person understands deeper the characteristics of group actions, then he could put a tight control over it for better realizing the effectiveness of group. The group leader should be a good observer for group actions process. Strong observation ability can make a person become a more valuable team member as well as a more efficient team leader. To develop and utilize the group dynamics, a team skills development plan should be set up. Firstly, the goal of a group should be clear to every group member through communication. Secondly, analyze the conflicts and obstacles existed among the group members, and then adopt relevant counter-measures to solve those conflicts. Thirdly, though effective decisions, the task of a group should be accomplished for realizing the group goal eventually. Finally, a positive and energetic group atmosphere should be established for team development over a long term. All the above is my reflection on group dynamics.

4. Leadership development plan

4.1 analyze the strengths and weaknesses of current leading organizations. To effective lead a group of members and compete with rivals for business winning, it is very important to know that what are the strengths and weaknesses of current leading organizations. And different organizations have different organizational cultures, thus a great leadership should be suitable to the current organizational culture, as well as improving it. Leadership also concentrates on the current resources that the organization owns. Through analyzing the strengths which current resources could bring, a more leadership can be effectively implemented.

4.2 make most of identified leadership resources. Leadership demands that the leader can accomplish all the necessary things within his leading scope with the lowest costs, by making most of the organizational resources based on the background of objective surroundings. Then it can be seen that the leadership resources include organizational members, leader’s authorized power exerted on others, the leader’s personal influences, and the leading experiences left by the former leaders, etc. To utilize the leadership to its largest extent, the leader needs to mixed use of various leadership resources.

4.3 incorporate the leadership strategy into the organizational culture. Leadership should not only be regarded as a professional ability of leaders, but also be treated as an organizational strategy that should be incorporated into the organizational culture. This is a critical step for the organization’s leadership development. Through incorporating leadership strategy into the organizational culture, both the leaders and the subordinates can better understand the importance of leadership for an organization (Meagan, 2009). Then all the people of the organization will contribute their knowledge and wisdom to promote leadership’s development. There can be leadership learning and improving atmosphere generated inside the organization.

4.4 focus strategic businesses on developing effective leaders. Organizational leaders as the carriers of leadership bear the mission of leading the organization to develop better and faster. Therefore, selecting and training the right leaders or potential leaders is a basic step for the organizational leadership utilization, as well as leadership development. There are many ways and methods to choose and train the leader candidates or potential leaders. And I think focusing strategic businesses on developing effective leaders should be the core thoughts of all the ways and methods to choose and train the leader candidates or potential leaders.

4.5 continually offer feedback and improvement for leadership. An effective leadership development plan cannot be separated from continuous feedback of leading activities. Through analyzing the leadership feedbacks, organizational leaders can clearly be aware of their shortages and then adopt related improvement measures to continuously perfect their leadership. To sum up, leadership development should be a recurrent process. There is no end for leadership development, but there are necessities for setting up a leadership development plan. Following a leadership development plan, leadership can be developed better with adding more value to the organization.

5. Self selected episode：Organizational culture functions

I once attended a lecture about Organizational culture. Through that lecture, I deeply understand the importance of organizational culture. The followings are my personal summaries for organizational culture.

Organizational culture refers to the common values, fundamental beliefs and behavior’s norms existed in organizations, as well as all the reflections of them. Organizational culture is formed in the process of organization long-term survival and development (Treasa, 2010); it is shared and followed by all the organizational members. To be specific, organizational culture includes all the community senses accepted by the majority of an organization, such as values, norms, group consciousness, thinking methods, work styles, expectations, and belonging sense of community.

Organizational culture functions refer to all the roles organizational culture plays for the organization and all the abilities that organizational culture has for maintaining the organization’s existence. Every coin has two sides, so is the organizational culture. Organizational culture has both positive features and negative features for an organization. Its positive features can improve organizational commitment and help organizations improve effectiveness. While the negative features is counterproductive but can be reduced and controlled effectively.

The positive functions of organizational culture include: orientated function, constraint function, cohesion function, inspiriting function and adjusting function. 1) Orientated function means organizational culture can have a guiding role for both organizational conducts and its members’ behaviors. Through playing the guiding part, organization culture can effectively promote organizational conducts and its members’ behaviors to be conformed to the organizational objectives. 2) Constraint function means that organization culture plays a constraint and normative role on each employee’s ideology, psychology and behaviors.3) Cohesion function means that organizational culture is regarded and defined as a bond for drawing all its members together and then creating a tremendous solidarity and cohesion. 4) Inspiriting function means that organizational culture can bring organizational members high strenuous enterprising spirits and emotions, and then maximize its staff’s working enthusiasm and initiatives. 5) Adjustment function of organizational culture refers to that organizational culture can help its new members to fast adapt the new organizational values, as well as other aspects of organizational culture.

The negative functions of organizational culture include: barrier to innovation, barrier to diversification, and barrier to mergers and acquisitions. 1) Barrier to innovation. When the organizational environment is in the process of dynamic changes arisen from organizational innovation, the organizational shared values may be inconsistent with the demands of furthering improving organizational efficiency, and then organizational culture becomes barrier to organizational innovation. 2) Barrier to diversification. Strong organizational culture will inevitably demand the staff’s values are consistent with the organizational values, which definitely lead to the monotonicity of decision-making and disappearance of diversity advantages. Therefore, organization can become barrier to diversification. 3) Barrier to mergers and acquisitions. When the managers are carrying out mergers or acquisitions actions, if the two organizations’ culture cannot be integrated successfully, then a large number of conflicts, contradictions, and confrontations will be given birth to the organization managers. Thus organizational culture could become barrier to mergers or acquisitions actions.