Torn

Torn is exactly what I feel a lot of the time here lately.    I am  torn about how much time I spend at work, school and on school work instead of with my daughter.  I am torn about how much more work I seem to do at work than even those above me.  And I am also torn about my feelings toward my organization in regards to organizational learning. 

As I assume most people in the class are doing I am trying to compare what I am learning in this class to my own organization.  Not just in VCUHS as a whole but mostly trying to apply what I am learning to what we do in the blood bank.  There are some things I read and we talk about that I feel we are doing right, but there are others that we are not doing at all.  For example, I think my manager has made pretty good strides at providing and promoting “hallways.”  We have EPIC (Employee-Led performance improvement comittee)  which any employee can meet and discuss things they would like to see done differently (no senior, supervisor, or manager can be a part of the meetings unless asked to).   It has been stressed that these meetings are not just gripe sessions, but real problem solving sesssions.  You can’t bring up a problem to management unless the group has come up with a solution for the problem.  Another way my manger has created hallways is to move the staff meetings out of the lab and away form all the distractions.  The problem that I have with these strategies is that neither one bring together EVERYONE.  I see the idea of hallways as bringing all levels of the organization together to share ideas.  Our committees still are separated from the different levels. 

So I guess the biggest reason I am torn is that as I am reading I am thinking ahead to the culture assignment and trying to relate Dixon’s lessons to my organization.  On one page I read and think we do a good job of that and then she may give an example or I think about how the WHO handled the same thing and I think we could do so much more and we could dowhat we do so much better.  I know we all come in to a class with a set of experiences that shape what and how we learn the material and thus how we build our concept map.  I feel that my concept map right now would look an incoherent mess!

Autonomy »« Change is the Child of Learning