MGT5013 – Page 3 – Richard J. Bocchinfuso

FIT – MGT5013 – Week 1, Discussion 2

How can an organization effectively manage diversity? How does this apply to an organization you know well? Consider the various concepts discussed within the chapter when developing this response. Also, I am looking for unique solutions for the difficult problems encountered.

I think at one point or another we’ve all felt discriminated against, to young, too old, not well dressed enough, what’s with the facial hair, etc… These prejudices maybe are not as caustic or polarizing as discriminatory issues associated with race, color, creed, national origin, ancestry, gender or sexual orientation but in my experience, there is no shortage of stereotyping in humanity and as the text states it’s these predispositions that fuel workplace discrimination.

My company mandates training for diversity and other associated topics. Just yesterday I received my annual invite to “Preventing Workplace Harassment Training” hosted by emtrain (https://emtrain.com/about). I love this training, complete with a warning system that resembles the color-coded terrorism threat advisory system devised by the Homeland Security Agency, and the vignettes that seem so preposterous. Then, of course, we hear stories about people like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose and we realize that the vignettes are actually pretty pedestrian in comparison to reality. Training is one way that my organization and other organizations work to manage diversity. My company and the HR department is also big on Emotional Intelligence, developing Emotional Intelligence can help us to be more aware, understand how what we say and do might be perceived, how our position within an organization can impact perceived intent, etc… Sure there are clear areas of discrimination which are binary, but often intent plays a big role where things aren’t so binary, self-awareness can help us better understand how our intent might be perceived. Tools like 360-degree assessments (aka reviews) can help us better understand our behaviors and how we are perceived, this candid feedback can help us become better leaders and people.

I tend to be a very direct person, but not everyone responds well to my direct approach. I am lucky to work in an environment which is very diverse, I enjoy differing perspectives, but I have a low tolerance for workplace politics. For years I had a general refusal to help subordinate peers work through their issues with each other, I would provide wise words like “you two need to work this $%#^ out because it has no place in the workplace”, yeah, that never really worked out all that well. 🙂 About four years ago we hired a new VP or HR who became active in the day to day operations; this was really helpful for me, I was now able to talk through issues with this person, and they would provide sound objective advice on how to best handle the situation. As an engineer, and not someone who sees focuses on the difference between people, instead focusing on what they have to offer, I did realize that I wasn’t taking the time to understand others and as a leader, this could be perceived as discriminatory.

When I read about things like wage inequality based on sexual orientation (Ozeren, 2014, p. 5) or flat out disqualifying someone based on sexual orientation (Ozeren, 2014, p. 6) it seems mind-boggling to me personally, but we are culturally polarized on this topic like so many other topics, so objectively speaking the facts are not all that surprising.

One thing I started doing a couple of years ago was using an online tool called text.io to write my job descriptions to improve the diversity of applicants and to ensure that I am using words, phrases, and tone that allows me to recruit the best and brightest candidates. text.io leverages big data, machine learning, and natural language processing to analyze and compare job listings with other companies competing for same diverse and talented individuals.

The World Is Flat (great book by Thomas L. Friedman by the way, I highly recommend it), and we live in a global economy; in my opinion diversity should no longer a have to be driven by mandates (e.g – EOE and AAP), because it’s the fuel by which companies will grow in the future. Sadly we still need programs like EOE and AA, but I am hopeful that one-day humanity will transcend race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, ancestry, etc… and allow us to realize Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream fully.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Much progress has been made since Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail written on April 16, 1963, and the “I Have A Dream” address he delivered in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963, but there is more work to be done. The more diverse our subcultures become, the more diverse our culture becomes.

References

Boyatzis, D. G. (2017, December 05). Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On? Retrieved March 09, 2018, from https://hbr.org/2017/02/emotional-intelligence-has-12-elements-which-do-you-need-to-work-on

Ozeren, E. (2014). Sexual Orientation Discrimination in the Workplace: A Systematic Review of Literature. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 109, 1203-1215. doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2013.12.613

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. (2018). Essentials of organizational behavior. New York, NY: Pearson.

Response 1

Scott, love the reference to “Full Metal Jacket”. I’ll admit I’ve known a few people over the years who may have benefitted from a bar of soap and sock. In all seriousness what happen to Private Leonard Lawrence better known as “Private Pyle” in the film shows the danger of groupthink in a caustic culture. Was everyone with a bar of soap in a sock a bad person? Did Pfc. Louden Downey and Lance Cpl. Harold Dawson wants to carry out the code red on Pfc. William Santiago? See how I switched films on you there but stayed with the theme. 🙂 While I think that training is critical, leadership is probably the most glaring problem in both of these cases and in most cases where discrimination and harassment are pervasive. Sure we could say the leaders weren’t properly trained, but they should be the trainers, and of course, the trainers need to be trained but they are in leadership positions personally I expect more. Then again I find myself let down often by my expectations.

References

Tsai, Y. (2011). Relationship between Organizational Culture, Leadership Behavior and Job Satisfaction. BMC Health Services Research, 11(1). doi:10.1186/1472-6963-11-98

Response 2

Steve, I agree with Scott regarding training, but my question is when does the training begin. I propose it starts much earlier than when an individual enters the workforce and is subjected to organizational diversity training. The muscle memory created when I minds are most malleable will likely persist for a long, long time and while these predispositions can be masked the judging and stereotyping that lies beneath the social facade continues to fuel discriminatory behavior.

I read these two articles recently:

The situations Sheryl Sandberg outline is very real, dangerous and disturbing. We have to start aggressively training humanity, these are problems that end up in organizations, but I don’t believe they originate there, nor do I believe they can be rectified there.

Published by rbocchinfuso on March 9, 2018 | Permalink

FIT – MGT5013 – Week 1, Discussion 1

There were many different organizational behavior concepts introduced in this chapter. Reflect back to a situation that you either encountered in your personal or professional life that involved one of these concepts. Would the outcome have been any different if you had prior knowledge from this week’s readings and discussions? (Describe the situation and the actual outcome within your response)

There were quite a few concepts that were introduced in both chapter 1 and chapter 2 of this week’s reading. I work in the technology field, and while my home office is in New York City, I spend a significant amount of time in San Francisco. There is no lack of diversity in NYC or SFO and one thing that I love about the tech field today (wasn’t always this way) is the focus on substance over style. I wear jeans, a t-shirt a hoodie and sneakers to work almost every day, I work with a very diverse group of people and the culture is one that values, respects and demands differing perspectives. With this said we have a corporate culture comprised of three core areas, sales, engineering and back office. While the engineering team has transcended to a place where individuals are measured by their contributions the sales team seems to at a minimum still place style on equal footing with substance. Style vs. substance is an area of conflict within our corporate culture, a conflict which at times I stoke because I am hoping we can move to a place where diversity is welcomed and we realize that each person given the opportunity had a unique perspective to share, a view that could dramatically alter an outcome. While recent harassment and discrimination headlines involving tech giants like Uber and Google coupled with other Silicon Valley headlines may challenge the positive changes I have observed, I think the progress we’ve made is astonishing.

I am a culture reigns supreme sort of person, I believe that great corporate cultures are comprised of great subcultures. I battle every day to keep culture first, with group cohesion being paramount to me. Group cohesion is not socialism; it’s not about equal wages, it’s about mutual respect, trust and the ability to depend on one another so that we can achieve outcomes beyond what any one individual is capable of achieving on their own. I have been with my current employer for twelve years, I have run a high-performing team for all twelve years, and I have been invited to what my company calls Presidents Club, eleven of the twelve years. I have declined the invite all eleven times, the first three years I declined no one said much, in year four the CEOs administrative assistant at a national sales meeting asked me why I never go to Presidents Club. Presidents Club trips are trips to exotics locations like Bali, Hawaii, etc… I replied with I can’t in good conscious leave behind my team of twenty plus people to sun myself while they keep working, everyone is deserving because we succeed or fail together. I expect everyone to work hard, I expect everyone to be smart, and I expect exemplary performance within the confines of what an individual is capable of. An individual’s capabilities are expected to grow with time, but this is what I expect from the team and myself, this is the subculture, and this subculture is what has gotten me an invite to Presidents Club, accepting would be counter-cultural. (I paraphrased, the actual conversation and follow-up Jerry Maguire paper was much longer). The conversations which followed led to the company to allow me to use the dollars they would have spent for my wife and me to attend the Presidents Club trip for a team retreat. I truly believed in this and eight years later my team continues to outperform, and we continue to hold a frugal retreat once a year which the entire team attends. Our team has the highest group cohesion of any group in the company, and I’d like to believe actions like what I outlined above have and continue to play a significant role.

Lastly, I related to Evidence-based management (EBM) and big data. I am an engineer, and I like empirical data, I trust my gut, but I also like big data sets and analytics to make me feel good about my guttural decision making. I recently wrote a blog entitled “I’m a skeptic, satiated by large raw data sets, analysis & inference” about my addiction to data, analytics, and inference.
I also think in the world we live in, the best data is often gathered indirectly, the tech and marketing industry calls this sentiment analysis. My team uses a platform called Slack as our primary communication medium, we have a channel in Slack called #the-railroad, the way this works is anyone can post something to the railroad with a chat command “/on” followed by what they are working on. I wrote the chatbot and what it does is capture and log the post, post it to #the-railroad for everyone to see, uses NLP (natural language processing) to perform sentiment analysis. Once the sentiment analysis is complete it sends the poster back some motivational words based on sentiment; there is also a web page where I can view all the analytics over time, by individual, day of week, time of day, etc… The bot uses a dictionary of words that are categorized as positive, negative or neutral, and a naive bayes algorithm to calculate sentiment. To improve accuracy ‘noise’ or ‘stop’ words are removed. The result is the following: https://sites.google.com/view/quokka-analytics/home
I have an addiction, I know. I like to analyze everything, I have to apply gamification to everything, but this makes employee reviews so much more interesting. 🙂

When I think about ethics and some of the things I have witnessed over the years, I feel uncomfortable, but I think I’ve said enough.

References

Chang, E. (2018, January 04). “Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Dark Side. Retrieved March 07, 2018, from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/brotopia-silicon-valley-secretive-orgiastic-inner-sanctum

Fuchs, C. (2018, March 5). Ex-recruiter accuses Google of hiring discrimination against white, Asian men in lawsuit. Retrieved March 07, 2018, from https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/ex-recruiter-accuses-google-hiring-discrimination-against-white-asian-men-n853601

Kosoff, M. (2017, June 06). Mass Firings at Uber as Sexual Harassment Scandal Grows. Retrieved March 07, 2018, from https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/uber-fires-20-employees-harassment-investigation

Ku, G., Wang, C. S., & Galinsky, A. D. (2015). The promise and perversity of perspective-taking in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 35, 79-102. doi:10.1016/j.riob.2015.07.003

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. (2018). Essentials of organizational behavior. New York, NY: Pearson.
Edited on 03/07/2018 at 09:38:PM EST

Response 1

Jasmin, thanks for sharing, I can relate to the cultural differences in Japan and ceremony with which the Japanese do business. In the late 90s I made a number of repeated trips to Japan because of a partnership my company at the time had with Hitachi. I am a pretty informal person, but that certainly doesn’t fly in Japan, the business card exchange ritual was quite an experience, the best way I can describe it is by highlighting the business card exchange scene in the film American Phyco, just like in the scene I felt like the stock, the font, etc… were all under intense scrutiny. 🙂

It’s funny because today I am in full Save A Tree mode and don’t use business cards, everything I do is prefixed by an “E”. I trade contact information either using a digital business card with the app Haystack (and a QR code) or I point someone to my LinkedIn profile. In my day-to-day interacting with other people who are in technology, who like me can’t understand the people who still print out emails, this is perfectly acceptable. With this said I know if I have a meeting at Bank of Tokyo or HSBC, I put a suit on instead of jeans and t-shirt and I bring cards, and I also make sure that the cards looked like they are still warm from the printing press.

References

Gakuran, M. (2014, April 24). What You Need To Know About Exchanging Business Cards in Japan. Retrieved March 11, 2018, from https://blog.gaijinpot.com/exchanging-business-cards-japan/

Jacobs, H. (2017, January 17). I forgot one thing on my trip to Japan – and now I have to apologize to every person I meet. Retrieved March 11, 2018, from http://www.businessinsider.com/japan-business-culture-etiquette-bring-business-cards-2017-1

Published by rbocchinfuso on March 7, 2018 | Permalink