Courage to challenge

This blog is dedicated to my self-reflection on how courageous I have been to challenge others’ opinions during my third MBA term at CULC. The reflection is based on CIPD’s description of Courage to Challenge (2016)

Firstly, this behaviour is about remaining calm and firm on my own opinion when facing opposition (CIPD 2013). In a class about Fairness in Resourcing and Talent Management module, my classmate Sara agreed with that pilots should definitely retire at 65 years old, considering that they are responsible for many people’s lives. Meanwhile, I believed age has different effects on different people and as long as the person passes periodical health check and other necessary ability tests, they should be able to continue working. After around 5 minutes of argument, both of us remained unchanged about our opinions.

 

Secondly, helping to move a lengthy debate or issue forward by pointing out pertinent facts is also part of courage to challenge (CIPD 2013). This term, two friends of mine in another group had conflict and kept blaming each other about some past actions. After observing and listening to both sides, I decided to intervene and convinced them that the most important thing is the upcoming tasks, that arguing about what already happened had no use, and that they should forgive each other and focus on the new tasks instead.

 

Thirdly, courage to challenge also involves consulting others for advice and suggestion when facing difficulties (CIPD 2013). In Employee Engagement module, on the actual day of the focus group interview, some interviewees cancelled in the last minutes, so I asked my teammates as well as the other interviewees openly about whether we should delay the interview or not. After that, we came to the conclusion of conducting two focus groups, 1 for Nigerians only and the other for Indians. They turned out to be very successful and in-depth interviews.

 

In conclusion, I believe that I already possess a certain level of courage to challenge, and it has helped me to discover more knowledge and ideas from others. However, I am still shy when having to give others feedback on their weaknesses because I do not want to hurt people’s feelings. To overcome this, I plan to learn how to give constructive feedback through training workshop available at CULC as well as consult my experienced colleagues.

 

CIPD (2013) Courage to Challenge [online] available from <http://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/Courage%20To%20Challenge.pdf> [16 August 2016]

 

CIPD (2016) CIPD profession map [online] available from <http://www.cipd.co.uk/cipd-hr-profession/cipd-hr-profession-map/default.html >[16 August 2016]

Role Model

In this blog, I will demonstrate how much of a role model I have been since the beginning of this term of my MBA at CULC, based on the behaviour description by CIPD (2016).

 

According to CIPD (2013), a role model person firstly needs to have well-defined personal values and always live up to those values. As for me, I value integrity and honesty the most in life, so I have tried my best to do things properly during my study by following the rules and never cheating. To be specific, in Employee Engagement module, our coursework requires sending a survey to people who have work experience of 1-3 years in 2 countries, and our group chose India and Nigeria because we thought there are a lot of Indians and Nigerians in CULC. However, it turned out that most of the Indians and Nigerians we know have less than 1 year work experience. Instead of cheating by letting people with no work experience answer the survey, I encouraged my teammates to try our best to fulfil the requirements, and finally e managed to get enough people. Similarly, I always comply with CULC’s principles of no plagiarism by doing my work authentically and paraphrase, cite and quote properly when using others’ research and information for my work.

 

Furthermore, I believe I am a role model because I admit my mistakes and try my best to fix them (CIPD 2013). In Developing People module, our group have a weekly progress report to submit, and tasks are divided early to each member for individual work, then sent back to me for consolidation. In the first two weeks, I consolidated the report at the last minutes that when I saw some mistakes by my friends, I had no choice but to change immediately for submission. However, after that, my group mates told me they noticed the changes I made to their parts. Because they want to really learn and improve themselves, they asked me to discuss with them next time and let them make the changes. After that, I realised my fault and admitted it, and started consolidating the report earlier than usual to allow time for amendments.

 

In conclusion, all of the above examples show how I demonstrated the CIPD’s Role Model behaviour during my current study term. From my own reflection, I learn that it is crucial to be a good role model, especially when being a leader, because my members are very likely to copy my behaviours: when I show my serious attitude in studying, my teammates feel more motivated and vice versa. However, sometimes I failed to lead by example, such as sending my part after the agreed deadlines or turning up late for team meetings. Being aware of the importance of the Role model behaviour to my future HR career, I plan to improve my time management – the current biggest weakness of mine, as well as learning from other great role model including my tutors and classmates to constantly improve myself.

 

References:

CIPD (2013) Role Model [online] available from <http://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/Role%20Model.pdf> [16 August 2016]

CIPD (2016) CIPD profession map [online] available from <http://www.cipd.co.uk/cipd-hr-profession/cipd-hr-profession-map/default.html >[16 August 2016]

Personally Credible

This blog will demonstrate how personally credible I have been in the third term of my MBA course at Coventry University London Campus (CULC) as required by the CIPD (2016).

 

Firstly, being personally credible involves considering how to add value using my own expertise (CIPD 2016). I have demonstrated this behaviour by always choosing the tasks that suits my personal strengths to tackle in group work. For example, in the coursework one of my Employee Engagement Module, I volunteered to work on research instrument part because I am sure my advanced academic research skills will be helpful for this part. In the same coursework, I also voluntarily created the online survey for our primary quantitative research because I have had a lot of experience using Google Forms. Additionally, when it came to our focus group interviews for the same module, I took the role of the group moderator because I used to conduct similar interviews for my undergraduate student organisation.

 

Secondly, a personally credible individual is willing to constantly enhance his/her skills, knowledge and experience (CIPD 2013). As for me, this term I want to develop particularly my leadership skills by applying what I learnt in Leading in a Changing World module. Therefore, I am taking the team leader’s role in two groups of this term. Especially for Resourcing and Talent Management module, I have chance to work with new teammates who I have never cooperated with before, which makes me so excited to apply useful team building and team leading theories learnt last term.

 

Thirdly, this CIPD behaviour is also about sharing knowledge, skills and experience with others, which I believe I have managed to demonstrate this term. For example, when designing the training need analysis survey for Developing People module, instead of creating the online Google form by myself, I decided to show my teammates how to do it and let them try creating a new one, because these skills are very useful for further studies or even at work. In addition, I always let my groups discuss everything openly in group meetings so that I can help my teammates with their parts and vice versa.

 

Overall, personally credible people are those who give others impartial advice and are considered by others as wise counsel. In my case, not only my teammates but also my classmates often come to me for clarification of coursework and knowledge learnt in class.

 

From all these experiences, I learnt that being personally credible is salient to an HR practitioner because it enables me to help others – what HR people are supposed to do in any organisation. However, a shortcoming of mine related to this behaviour is that currently I am not spending much time on professional development. Specifically, I do not read news and magazines on HR regularly. I plan to improve my time management to spend more time reading about HR, as well as diversifying my reading sources from just textbooks to HR magazines and academic journal.

 

References

CIPD (2013) Personally Credible [online] available from <http://www.cipd.co.uk/binaries/Personally%20Credible.pdf> [16 August 2016]

CIPD (2016) CIPD profession map [online] available from <http://www.cipd.co.uk/cipd-hr-profession/cipd-hr-profession-map/default.html >[16 August 2016]