KM Self Study Part I

I began a self-study of my learning organization’s growth and flexibility, in hopes to better understand and articulate challenges we faced in adapting new educational paradigms and standards. These postings cover not only the daily occurrences at my college of education, but also some of the experiences I have had while working at other organizations. If you have questions or thoughts please email me at nsabir@indiana.edu.

Institutes of education managing change and shift: A reflective piece utilizing Daft’s framework (part I)

Bureaucracy, leadership, & delegation

Well, I think that overly bureaucratic organizations waste resources energy and are slightly inefficient, I don’t believe they are formed with ill intent but a rather formed over time to fulfill various needs as they arose. Perhaps my views are tainted while working in institutes of higher education for the past five years. In some of the more complex organizations I have seen an over emphasis on functional goals rather than an organization’s mission. As a complexity of each department grows, the accountability in day-to-day demands also increases. Additionally, I think the fear of immediate loss, whether it be a material resource or personal, outweighs a motivation for long-term gain.

While working on a research project abroad I experienced this form of bureaucratic structure personally. Because the staff was so focused on not losing critical resources and not wasting time they lost sight of the larger picture: evaluating the state of vocational education in a fragile society. To revamp the focus, one of the team’s project manager (re)evaluated the goals to move from a rule and procedure base to a larger picture. I believe the goal was to have employees move for a narrowminded focus, centered on day-to-day activities, to one that better incorporated the organizations mission.

While working for my department, a college of education, our group currently faces two main issues: leadership and delegation. When a group of instructional designers was constructed there was one supervisor. However the supervisor was more of a coordinator and less of a leader. To remedy this issue the group decided each individual would take on different leadership based roles. However it does quickly became an issue as boundaries and positions were not clearly defined. Our designers began to overstep each other in a deconstructive manner as the each tried to push their own agenda. (Again there was no ill intent – We all genuinely believed what we were doing was in the best interest of our students.) And, soon the issue went from a lack of leadership to too many cooks in the kitchen. To better establish boundaries as a cohort the instructional designers divided up responsibilities, tasks and timelines. Currently this is where our organization stands; it is trying to manage leadership, employee empowerment, co-design and co-learning, and task delegation. Looking back at four years of organizational restructuring, I think had we set aside specific boundaries and structures, the overpowering leadership and lack of delegation would not be as much of an issue as it stands today.

To be continued…