Conflict

The example I will be using regarding conflict and its resolution originates from my former workplace. The situation was a tragic consequence of the unequal balance between responsibility and liability. To give a little background information, the nonprofit organization I worked for had a manager that was also assigned multiple roles to fill out. By that order, I, being the assistant manager, was given these roles in a less direct manner. Thus I was given, to a lesser extent, the responsibility to manage HR, manage the resources, take the accounting department of the firm and lead it, among other things.

The problem with this setup is that for a new employee, getting to know the roles becomes a hurdle when there are so many to be fulfilled. A major conflict that happened was in the making of the database of the clients of this organization. The office manager gave this responsibility to me with a time constraint of one month while she teaches me the way around. The idea was to store the information, that was on paper, to a database that can be accessed easily and shared. While the typing of the forms took a long bit of time, there was a lot of potentially important information on there. My manager wanted just the names and the utter basics for the entries. I argued against it, but being the new employee meant that I lacked the self-confidence it took to implement my suggestion. I conceded to her insisting and continued to create this rudimentary database while somehow managing to do my other responsibilities aside from this project.

Instead of gritty details, I would prefer to go to the end of this job, where the database crashed, in a sense. My manager had asked me to redo the database multiple times, entering information selectively based on the needs of the current situation. Now this meant that, if there were 200 sheets and she made me redo it four times, I have had looked through 800 sheets. The amount of work this gave me pinned me down and I was resigned to be suboptimal at my managerial and assisting abilities. My choice to avoid conflict had caused an office-wide level of inefficiency.

A month after the most recent, and most complete rendition of the database had been formed, a new employee had been assigned to be my assistant, or rather my equal. My manager had two subordinates, and this was because of my absence from the job between two semesters. When I returned, it was chaos. The database could not only be shared, it could also be edited without restrictions. A week later, the database crashed. It appears that there had been so many temporary renditions of my database that no one was sure which one was the original one. I tried figuring out what went wrong by talking to my manager, but it resulted in an argument that heated up really fast. At the end of it I became very uncomfortable with my existence as a part of the organization, and I ultimately left it.

The avoidance of conflict and attempting to fix the consequences resulted in far more damage than if the attempt at this particular innovation had never been attempted.

Teamwork and the Individual

The article poses some interesting concepts to think about, given some constraints. The conclusion was extremely amusing for me because I come from a background where the kids are always in cahoots with the experimenters and the results are always nearly identical to the claim made in the article. My opinion may be a bit more biased than others due to the economic environment I witnessed in the formative years of my life.

Back to the article:
While the case of the first experiment is fairly accurate in relation to real life, I was quite surprised when the second kid pulling the rope got 3 instead of 1. The concept of fairness becomes a moot point to prove in most cases. The ones getting more only share their wealth 75% of the time. It seems to me that sometimes, the case between the interacting parties is, "I'll share so long that I am better off than most." When I was in ninth grade, seven of us had teamed up to make a project that we were sure would win us the prize. Team efforts give out greater yields than individual achievements, but the yield is barely ever shared fairly, or equally. We made an operational electric car with parts from junkyards around the city. We won the prize, but only a few of us were ever able to use that distinction. Most of the credit went to the person who seemed to perform well in front of the crowd, despite his/her lack of ability or interest in ensuring the success of the project.

I agree with the article in the rest of its points, though. My skepticism comes from personal experience, and the collaboration experiment, if done with adults, may have varied vastly depending on the participants of the experiment.

Society and the economy really does feel like a giant machine with millions of strings sticking out of it. Some pull and get little, some arrive to the scene with a cup or a bag full of marbles, while others control what comes out of the machine, because, as the article mentions, they know the ones performing the experiment, and no matter how much the rest of the kids pull the rope, these kids will always get the most marbles.

Illinibucks

The Illinibucks concept can turn into a very vast conversation of theories about how they may be used. But I believe most of their use would be in terms of class registration and perhaps prioritizing appointments, such as advising, or, for a more far-fetched idea, time tickets.

Essentially, Illinibucks can be a sort of "premium currency" that students may use in a variety of ways to help them get ahead in many of the university services that may allow its use.

Setting the value of the Illinibucks would be done by the university, at a level that would not be so high that the students would hesitate to spend them in the hopes of being able to salvage the most utility out of such a valuable resource, nor so low that students fail to give any proper value to it and waste the currency on meager things. The resources that may allow Illinibucks must be well-thought out in order to properly evaluate its usage.

I'm getting to the point fairly quickly because an introduction on the possible uses of Illinibucks seem limited to the most obvious ones. If the University gave Illinibucks out like they did for Cafe Credits for dorm students, it may have certain benefits, but then people would stockpile them in the hopes of getting something highly desired at the end of the semester, such as for registering for classes. Now, in that case, I believe the problem would be everyone dumping the currency into classes, defeating the purpose of it, because if everyone has the same amount (like Cafe Credits, if we are to consider the fact that there is a set maximum and the university will follow that suit), no one can get the preferential treatment and get ahead in line. In that case, the system breaks down. The same goes for advising appointments if students have a preferred advisor, or if they really need an override and can convince the office to allow them to take a class. For this particular option, the rush to go all-in may not be an issue, since the supply of advisors is relatively large, with the peculiar exception of the CS department.

Now let's consider a case where Illinibucks are distributed at the beginning of the semester. This model would immediately break down considering that the timing of this distribution would coincide with last-minute registrations and restricted registrations. Regardless of the variety proposed by the university, the students would definitely concentrate on getting into classes. Its a question of survivability here, since not being able to take enough classes equals to not being registered as a full time student, and that is a nightmare.

The above two considerations were taken with the thought that the amount of Illinibucks being given to students would be equal. It would be interesting to see how behaviors change if the currency were given out differently according to certain criteria.

Consider if it was distributed based on the year you're on.
On one case, freshmen get the least, and the number slowly increases as semesters pass. I mention this because for a majority of freshmen (and I may be generalizing this), there is a broader set of requirements to be fulfilled in order to take classes. GenEds, prerequisites and electives are available. The demand for most of those classes are very high, but as there are usually more alternatives for freshmen, it may make sense to increase the amount of Illinibucks you have as you progress towards graduation. Students will have a lower number of classes that they need to take as time goes on, and the more specific the list becomes, the more important getting into those classes will.
On the flip side, if freshmen get the most, they gain an invaluable asset in registering for classes they are most attracted to, and will likely spend the most amount of Illinibucks behind, while seniors, on the other extreme, would opt to more carefully spend the smaller number of available Illinibucks to pick out their own most preferred classes.

Team Success

In my college experience, there has been two notable teams that I have been a participant in. I will highlight the organization that I worked for (and have mentioned on multiple occasions in my previous posts).  This nonprofit was run extremely efficiently, and I attribute their structure of leadership (or rather, heirarchy) for their success.

The organization had a clear leader, Sally, the Founder and Director, with two particular positions underneath. The subordinate positions were the Office Manager, Leila and Program Director, Cornicha. I worked under Leila as the Office Assistant. Now this was almost identical to the leadership structure relating to Dual Authority from Bolman and Deal, but there was also another position taken by Taylor, the holder of the sole Accountant position that reported directly to Sally.

On with the operations of this organization, it is a small but efficient one. As I worked, it was clear how much was on the plate of every individual in the organization. I myself was tasked with the creation of the entire database system of the organization, so it turned out that our organization operated on a much larger scale than its employees can be expected to take. In reference to how the concept of an overwhelmed boss is described in the book, it is important to ensure that the assistants to the Director be as qualified, talented and as efficient as possible. Leila was almost a human machine, giving most of her time of the day behind the desk and on the field (field being the schools that we operated in). Under her was myself, and under me were the Site Leaders, the employees that worked directly with the schools around Champaign and its students. The daily reports from their sections were given to me, though I was strictly told to pass them on to Leila. It totaled to about 20-30 reports every single day. These were taken, evaluated, and corresponding decisions passed to Sally.

On the other hand, more long term operations were handled by Cornicha, under whom were the Site Coordinators. Now this bit may be confusing to draw out, but a single Site Coordinator was responsible for about 3 Site Leaders. The Leaders reported to the Coordinators in real time, while the overarching reports were given to Cornicha by the Coordinators. She would then make decisions regarding the monthly or weekly programming of the schools and pass that information on to the Coordinators.

All that data went to Sally for finalization. The  reports from both Leila and Cornicha, along with the accounting reports from Taylor went to Sally for finalization and approval. Among other things, Sally's responsibilities included dealing with grants and setting up partnerships, which happened almost semi- regularly.

Now it is easy to infer where the most pressure exists in this style or leadership in this kind of organization. Despite the incredible amount of data and information involved, Sally has managed to stay on top of all the events that passed in my time with the nonprofit organization. One may attribute this to the expected talent and experience of the head of any firm. Along with this, the two second-level employees of the organization help greatly in ensuring that the Director can manage everything happening with the firm without being overloaded and making bad or slow decisions from being under the influence of professional pressure.

The principal reason this team of around 20 employees successfully expanded their organization is largely due to following the terms of Katzenbach and Smith's features that distinguish high-functioning teams. As I read up on the particular traits, it was amusing to find how well all of the points clicked with the performance and environment of the organization.

Once highschool was over, everyone in the organization jumped to expand their field-trips and plans for the next academic year. From planning to gathering the required resources (be it anything from food to other grants), the team took the opportunity of the increased time till their summer program began to plan out way ahead of what may be considered necessary.

Now a habit of the entire organization was to list out, in colorful, often childish ways, the goals for the week, or month, or period of time in question that required certain things to be done by the time it passed. It was a constant source of motivation as each assigned role was ticked off and entire pages were discarded as the goals written came to fruition.