Joshua Lovette, Student at Appalachian State University
There are two types of feedback constructive feedback and destructive feedback. Constructive feedback is meant to be beneficial, to help someone improve, on the other hand destructive feedback, has no purpose other than putting someone down, so its completely useless in the business world. When giving feedback it is important that you make it constructive, focus on the material and how it can be improved. Its important not to insult someone or make them feel inadequate about the work their doing. Instead you want to help them improve. In contrast, destructive feedback delivers criticism without any direction, and does not stimulate improvement. Its basically insulting someone, by telling them there not good at meeting whatever objective they are working on. An example of both, out of my own personal experience was when me and a couple of co workers where promoted to crew trainers at McDonalds. The newly promoted crew trainers where young, I was one of the oldest at nineteen. And they where in charge of training new employees, who sometimes where much older than them. The only sixteen year old crew trainer, told another girl she was stupid and incompetent and couldn't even put food in a bag. I intervened and told the young crew trainer Catherine that we needed to talk in the back after work. I took over the young girls training from that point on. I used constructive feedback when I trained her, giving her advice on how she could improve the process.
Many of the social interactions we as business majors will participate in, will occur in meetings. Well ran meetings can help companies solve problems, develop ideas, and identify opportunities. Making meetings more productive, can also be a great way to promote team building through the experience of social interaction. As useful as meetings can be, they can also be a waste of time. If a meeting is poorly ran, you'll have employees who don't wont to be in it, employees on their cell phones and etc. Preparing for meetings can help prevent this, the first thing you want to do is define your purpose, meetings are about reaching decisions, or collaborating to solve problems or identify opportunities. Next is the participants you select for the meeting, you want to invite only the people who really needs to be there. Choosing the venue and time is very important, you want to select somewhere that is not distracting and where all participants can fell comfortable. Setting a productive agenda requires three questions to be answered. What do we nee to do in this meeting to accomplish our goals? What issues will be of greatest importance to all participants? What information must be available in order to discuss the issues.
Listeners who are effective adapt their listening approaches to different situations. Content listening's primary goal is to understand and retain the information in the speakers message. As students must of us use content listening almost every day in class, when taking notes and trying to retain information. The goal of people using critical listening is to understand and evaluate the meaning of the speakers message. You want to evaluate the logic, evidence, and the validity of the conclusions. Empathetic listening can be used when talking with a friend about their felling's. The goal of empathetic listening is to understand the speakers felling's, needs and wants so that you can appreciate his point of view, even if you don't agree with it. Active listeners users make a conscious effort to turn off their own filters and biases to truly hear and comprehend what the other party is saying.
Nonverbal communication can be a useful asset, there are six types of signals that are particularly important, facial expressions, gestures and postures, vocal characteristics, personal appearance, touch, time and space. Your face is the most important for expressing emotions, it revels both intensity and type of emotion you want to convey. For example, if someone comes up to me crying or frowning I can make the assumption that the person is upset. The way you position and move your body, express both specific and general messages, some voluntary and some involuntary. Your voice carries both intentional and non intentional messages. You can control what you say however, more often than not, you cant control the emotions which your vocal characteristics convey. People respond to other people off of appearances, your personal appearance should convey that you are serious about wanting a job, nice clothes well groomed hair and etc. Touch is an important way to convey warmth, comfort as well as control. Like touch time and space can be use to convey authority, imply intimacy, and send other non verbal messages.
Business etiquette is an important but also necessary element of every day business communication. Mutual respect and consideration among all participants is important. Nobody wants to work with someone who is rude to colleges or an embracement to the company. Treating others poorly can have a huge negative impact on moral and productivity. Poor business etiquette can chase away investors and consumers, as well as other important audiences your trying to attract.
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Friday, January 23, 2015
By: Joshua Lovette, Student at Appalachian State University, North Carolina
In any collaborative effort, team members often come from different back grounds and have different work habits and priorities. Take a restaurant for example I worked for McDonald's for six years and I have seen many people that come from different backgrounds, from your ex convicts to your college students. When I was made crew trainer I was put in charge of new employees training and assisting in managing a team. I was only nineteen at the time, most managers who used to be crew trainers said the younger employees couldn't stay focused on tasks and older employees didn't take them seriously.
I didn't have that problem due the fact that I seen the diversity of the employees I was put in charge of as an asset. I saw an increase in information, knowledge and experience. I saw a diverse view point, one that may work better than my own, but most importantly I saw higher performance levels in all employees. Using what we call group think in the business world, I was able to bring ideas in from all my employees and implement the ideas which I which I was allowed to. One idea that all the employees liked and agreed on was switching positions, they argued that it was hard to stay on task when they stayed at the same station all day every day.
So I let employees for the most part pick a position they wanted in the grill area and changed them every so often. Using group think I also found that if you give people, certain jobs and a bit of authority it makes them value their job more and strive to improve. So I found this could lower food costs and increase food production significantly.
Over coming resistance was a challenging task which I tackled head on, early in the stages of developing and training the best grill team I could I learned it's important to express understanding, what you want to do is help the other person relax and try to relate and comprehend where there coming from. Bringing resistance out into the open, discuss and find out what the reservations are about it. One thing you always want to do is evaluate others' objections fairly. Use your active listening skills to focus on what the other person is saying.
Using technologies for collaboration, is something I didn't learn at McDonald's. However, I learned this by being a student, social networking technologies are redefining team communication by helping erase the constraints of geographic and organization boundaries. My use of technology for collaboration is on much smaller scale I used technology to communicate coordinate and gather information and idea's to help enhance our projects chance of success. A huge advantage social networking brings is identifying the best people to collaborate on each problem or project, wherever they happen to be geographically.
Effective collaboration and a communication is the building blocks of having an effective team, in some situations you get to pick your collaborators, although I didn't get that opportunity, we agreed on goals and projects eminently, our team bonded through working together and breaks, clarifying individual responsibilities and positions was done in advance before the shift started. I also established clear processes, my employees new how the work would be managed from stat to finish.
Characteristics we had as a successful team has we had a clear objective and we all shared a sense of purpose, we trusted each other to do our up-most in our positions and to help each other out when one fell behind, we also communicated openly and honestly, this as you can imagine caused some conflict however, we new how to resolve conflicts quickly and effectively.
In any collaborative effort, team members often come from different back grounds and have different work habits and priorities. Take a restaurant for example I worked for McDonald's for six years and I have seen many people that come from different backgrounds, from your ex convicts to your college students. When I was made crew trainer I was put in charge of new employees training and assisting in managing a team. I was only nineteen at the time, most managers who used to be crew trainers said the younger employees couldn't stay focused on tasks and older employees didn't take them seriously.
I didn't have that problem due the fact that I seen the diversity of the employees I was put in charge of as an asset. I saw an increase in information, knowledge and experience. I saw a diverse view point, one that may work better than my own, but most importantly I saw higher performance levels in all employees. Using what we call group think in the business world, I was able to bring ideas in from all my employees and implement the ideas which I which I was allowed to. One idea that all the employees liked and agreed on was switching positions, they argued that it was hard to stay on task when they stayed at the same station all day every day.
So I let employees for the most part pick a position they wanted in the grill area and changed them every so often. Using group think I also found that if you give people, certain jobs and a bit of authority it makes them value their job more and strive to improve. So I found this could lower food costs and increase food production significantly.
Over coming resistance was a challenging task which I tackled head on, early in the stages of developing and training the best grill team I could I learned it's important to express understanding, what you want to do is help the other person relax and try to relate and comprehend where there coming from. Bringing resistance out into the open, discuss and find out what the reservations are about it. One thing you always want to do is evaluate others' objections fairly. Use your active listening skills to focus on what the other person is saying.
Using technologies for collaboration, is something I didn't learn at McDonald's. However, I learned this by being a student, social networking technologies are redefining team communication by helping erase the constraints of geographic and organization boundaries. My use of technology for collaboration is on much smaller scale I used technology to communicate coordinate and gather information and idea's to help enhance our projects chance of success. A huge advantage social networking brings is identifying the best people to collaborate on each problem or project, wherever they happen to be geographically.
Effective collaboration and a communication is the building blocks of having an effective team, in some situations you get to pick your collaborators, although I didn't get that opportunity, we agreed on goals and projects eminently, our team bonded through working together and breaks, clarifying individual responsibilities and positions was done in advance before the shift started. I also established clear processes, my employees new how the work would be managed from stat to finish.
Characteristics we had as a successful team has we had a clear objective and we all shared a sense of purpose, we trusted each other to do our up-most in our positions and to help each other out when one fell behind, we also communicated openly and honestly, this as you can imagine caused some conflict however, we new how to resolve conflicts quickly and effectively.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
By Joshua Lovette, student at Appalachian State University, North Carolina
By Joshua Lovette, student at Appalachian State University, North Carolina
Communication has become a vital part of the business world. With electronic media and social media in particular redefining relationships between business and their internal and external stakeholders, it's important that business communicate clearly, legally and ethically.
Collaborating and sharing information, is a large part of the business world as I've previously stated above. The need to work and share information quickly and as accurately as possible is a constant in the world of business. But we need to remember technology is just a tool, people can't comprehend emotions behind emails, or a since of urgency so its important that we communicate or ideas and emotions clearly.
In addition to communicate clearly as business majors its important that we communicate legally. Business communication is also bound by a wide variety of laws and regulations, which encompasses many areas such as, promotional communication, contracts employment communication, intellectual property, financial reporting, defamation, transparency requirements and more. An example of legal communication in promotional communications that market specialists, especially need to be aware of is the many laws that that govern the truth and accuracy in advertising.
As a business management major I believe its important for employers to establish clear ethical guidelines and boundaries for their employees to follow. Ensuring ethical communication will be important to me and the image of the company I work for. However, ensuring ethical business communication requires three elements, ethical individuals, ethical company leadership, and the appropriate polices and structures to support employees.
Communication has become a vital part of the business world. With electronic media and social media in particular redefining relationships between business and their internal and external stakeholders, it's important that business communicate clearly, legally and ethically.
Collaborating and sharing information, is a large part of the business world as I've previously stated above. The need to work and share information quickly and as accurately as possible is a constant in the world of business. But we need to remember technology is just a tool, people can't comprehend emotions behind emails, or a since of urgency so its important that we communicate or ideas and emotions clearly.
In addition to communicate clearly as business majors its important that we communicate legally. Business communication is also bound by a wide variety of laws and regulations, which encompasses many areas such as, promotional communication, contracts employment communication, intellectual property, financial reporting, defamation, transparency requirements and more. An example of legal communication in promotional communications that market specialists, especially need to be aware of is the many laws that that govern the truth and accuracy in advertising.
As a business management major I believe its important for employers to establish clear ethical guidelines and boundaries for their employees to follow. Ensuring ethical communication will be important to me and the image of the company I work for. However, ensuring ethical business communication requires three elements, ethical individuals, ethical company leadership, and the appropriate polices and structures to support employees.
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