Think of a situation where you believe you or your coworker missed an opportunity to utilize the kind of critical/reflective thinking and strengths based approach that this week’s authors describe.
At my former organization, I was working with a diverse staff. While I had not learned about the strengths-based approach, if time could be reversed I would apply it to some of the employees. Specifically, there was one employee who lacked social graces yet was so brilliant bringing so much to the table. His team members in the marketing department would constantly complain of his downright rudeness and causing disagreements in the team. Together with my fellow head of departments, we would refer to the human resource manager for the misconduct. Nonetheless, given a chance to redo things, I would openly admit that he was an excellent marketer, which was a single talent that drove the business in a big way. I would encourage him to portray positive behavior in all other organizational activities, and explain to him the essence of a good interpersonal relationship at the workplace.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Now, imagine that you are the supervisor addressing the missed opportunity and describe the problem, situation or issue. Using the steps or approaches that the authors discussed: How did you respond to this situation?
If I was the supervisor addressing the missed out opportunity, I would have called for a sitting with the heads of departments and asked them to mention the performance stats of the employee alongside his instances of his misbehavior. While it was apparent that he was consciously an unsociable team member, it was not possible to establish the cause of his poor interpersonal skills. I would have urged the organization to come up with more team building activities to foster positive interactions as I monitor his behavior to establish if there is a positive improvement.
Try to describe how the techniques you use help the supervisee to broaden his/ her ability to reflectively and critically think.
While my technique of dealing with the situation was not definite, it was just a way of strategizing to assist the supervisee, offering him an option to redeem his behavior. By reaching out to the supervisee and asking for his view regarding the case at hand and asking him how he had tried to handle his behavior with other people in his social circle compels him to think critically and reflectively. This would help him see various ways of addressing the issue before terming it a long term problem.
