PACE (Practical Application for Careers and Enterprises)

For the last PACE class, we were assigned teams of two to three people of first and second-year students. Each team was given a photo of the painting to recreate. The exception was my team, who created the frame for the canvases. The goal was to create a cohesive painting that will hang in one of the graduate buildings. This year, our class was given The Great Wave off Kanagawa to paint. Teams had to work together to ensure the colors and lines would match. The painting exercise was not only fun, but also required using many of the skills we learned in the last year such as team-building, conflict management, and decision making. After a few hours, we were successful!

PACE has many facets, but most valuable for me was the opportunity to grow both professionally and personally. The class gives a rare opportunity in life to think about one’s own strengths, weaknesses, and motivations and make choices going forward based on a better understanding of oneself. Through combining topics like internship searching, conflict resolution, and client relationship-building, I could see that these areas are not as disconnected as I once thought. Paint day is just one of the more creative ways we employ the topics we learn into real projects.

Early last semester, Assistant Dean and Director of Career Management Beth Ursin asked us to write a LinkedIn bio for ourselves as practice on telling our own professional story. I remember my brain going blank—I had no idea what to write about myself. I had all of my life experiences in front of me, but no clue on how I should begin to explain them. It took me two hours to create a bio that I was only somewhat satisfied with.

I re-tried the exercise last week and it only took me fifteen minutes. This is the value of completing an integrated class like PACE. How can we expect to become good managers if we don’t understand ourselves? I think you can get a lot of knowledge these days from reading books, watching Youtube videos, and even online courses, but it’s nearly impossible to replicate the type of personal growth you can achieve from working on small teams with others to accomplish goals like we did in PACE.

 Next semester, I will be taking over the Angel Fund blog from Nathan Foos. Angel Fund is a year-long experiential course to invest in early-stage companies using real dollars. If you would like to read what the class was up to this year, click here. 

I’m looking forward to this Fall and excited for next year’s cohort to experience the challenge, growth, and fun that comes from PACE. 

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

What do you do?

A question that comes up at nearly every dinner party, college reunion, and wedding.

A lot of us are defined by our jobs—a trap that’s easy to fall into. After all, we spend 1/3 of our life at work. For the average person, that’s more than 90,000 hours in our lifetime. So the question, what do you do, or, with the full implication written out, what do you do for work makes a lot of sense. We feel tremendous pressure to give a solid answer to that question.

Most of us in the MBA program are still in a process of figuring out our careers. But in PACE class last week, Stuart Read posed a slightly different question: why work at all? No, he wasn’t trying to dissuade us from applying for jobs. Based on the book Drive: The Surprising Truth that Motivates Us by Daniel Pink, he was asking us to establish good and bad reasons to work. One half of the classroom wrote on sticky-notes jobs we would like to have and that would fulfill three key aspects of a job Pink outlines in his book (Purpose, Mastery, and Autonomy). The idea is that a job high in these three areas will motivate us long beyond the desire for a paycheck. The second half of the class wrote down jobs they wouldn’t like to have. Through this process, we realized how important it is to have purpose beyond just a paycheck. This made sense. Recent studies have demonstrated that people with jobs they like tend to live longer on average (de Haaff). More fulfilling job = More motivated at a job = Longer life.

This equation generally holds true. In a 2014 study, researchers found “those who had self-rated themselves as having a high sense of purpose were more likely to have survived. Even after controlling for other markers of psychological and affective well-being, the results of the analysis showed that purposeful individuals outlived their more aimless peers” (“A Meaningful Job”).

But towards the end of the class discussion, a classmate of mine brought up a valid point: what about people who have intrinsically high stress (but also highly motivating) jobs? Just because a job fulfills the three key areas outlined by Pink doesn’t mean someone is living a stress-free lifestyle. Workplace stress, even in a purpose-filled job, can take a toll. She had a point: a 2015 study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford concluded that 10-38 percent of difference in average life expectancy could be explained by job conditions, even after accounting for other factors like demographics and education levels (Goh). Of course, workplace stress can manifest in any type of job in any location and the outcomes are always negative.

So the question is not just how do we find work that motivates us, but at the same time how do we manage the stress of working? Nearly everyone I know experiences some level of work-related stress, including those that love their jobs. To find out how people manage this stress, I turned to people who I knew had experienced high levels of stress in their workplace: an attorney, a veterinarian, and a mechanical engineer during the War in Afghanistan. I asked them how they dealt with the pressure. The answers varied, but interestingly all included three themes:

     1. Taking care of themselves

What we always hear from Ashley in PACE: sleep, nutrition, exercise—really important to managing stress.

    2. Distraction

All of them brought up distracting themselves with fun in their lives or intensely focusing on the details of their work to avoid thinking about the pressure.

     3. Accepting that they do something difficult

Allowing themselves to have emotions, take breaks, and process that their work is hard is crucial to working with stress.

I don’t profess to have the answers. Everyone has a different way of coping with stress (I personally run down my street as hard as I can until I tire myself out), but working in a job we feel passionate about is a good first step. The second, and in some ways harder, is managing our workplace stress.

How do you manage your work pressure? Let me know in the comments.

Works Cited

“1/3 of your life is spent at work.” Gettysburg College, 2019, https://www.gettysburg.edu/news/stories?id=79db7b34-630c-4f49-ad32-4ab9ea48e72b&pageTitle=1%2F3+of+your+life+is+spent+at+work. Accessed 29 April 2019.

“A Meaningful Job Linked to Higher Income and a Longer Life.” Association For Psychological Science, 3 January 2017, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/a-meaningful-job-linked-to-higher-income-and-a-longer-life.html. Accessed 10 May 2019.

de Haaff, Brian. “People Who Love to Work Live Longer, According to Science.” Inc.com, 20 May 2016, https://www.inc.com/brian-de-haaff/people-who-love-their-work-live-longer-according-to-science.html. Accessed 29 April 2019.

Goh, Joel, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Stefanos Zenios. Exposure To Harmful Workplace Practices Could Account For Inequality In Life Spans Across Different Demographic Groups.” Health Affairs, vol. 34, no. 10, 2015, https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/full/10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0022#ref-2. Accessed 10 May 2019.

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

For the last month of class, we’ve been focusing on our year-long projects, which will conclude at the end of April. We have been busy finalizing recommendations, practicing presenting, and deciding how to tell a story (if you missed it, see my previous post here).

Each project is completely unique in the recommendations and deliverables. For example, my client is a not-for-profit in the Portland area. My team and I were initially tasked with figuring out why there has been an 11% decline in volunteers since 2011. Volunteers are crucial to almost all not-for-profit organizations, including our client. After preliminary research, we examined the on-boarding process of the volunteers—how anyone interested in volunteering can start—and realized the process could take over three months! From this realization, we narrowed in on reorganizing their on-boarding process and eliminating operational inefficiencies. What started as a potentially HR or marketing project ended up being almost entirely operations focused.

Though this was my group’s project, other groups worked on financial forecasting tools, marketing plans, change management and process improvement plans, research and development of new ventures, and franchising businesses.

Below are a couple of takeaways that I learned through the PACE project this year:

1)   Be Flexible. Clients often hire you to narrow in on the problem, not just give a recommendation. While sometimes they only require your expertise in a particular field, often they require help outside of the scope of the original proposal. Being able to adjust quickly and find additional resources is one of the most valuable parts of receiving a diversified degree like an MBA.

2)   Develop Trust. Just like any relationship in our lives, trust between teammates made a huge difference in the ease of groups working together. The sooner groups developed trust, the sooner they were able to allocate tasks. The psychological benefit, for example, of not worrying about the next deliverable because they knew their teammate would turn in great work was monumental.

3)   Utilize Your Strengths and Recognize Your Weaknesses. One of the most beneficial parts of receiving my MBA is realizing my own strengths and weaknesses. At Atkinson, professors and students are willing to give candid feedback on topics such as your presentation style or writing technique. Through working with my team, I have learned to recognize others’ strengths and distribute responsibilities based on strengths. Additionally, an MBA program provides the perfect opportunity to work on our weaknesses! There is no better place to fail than in the classroom, where the impact of failing is low. I have frequently heard professors say “fail here, so you don’t fail out there.”

On April 19th, teams will turn in their final report and present to clients, the cohort, and professors the results of their projects. If you’re a prospective student, faculty or staff member, or current MBA student, please join us on Friday April 19th at 12:15PM in Kaneko Commons to hear about the great work that first-year students have completed this year!

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

I was recently scanning LinkedIn and stumbled upon an article about the best tech cities. Included as part of the article was this graph:

There’s a ton of data in this graph. Each city is ranked on a scale on six different characteristics that reflect technology friendliness, according to Savills research. While visually pleasing, I had difficulty understanding the graph. I know New York tops the list, but how does it compare with Austin on “Talent Pool”? How does Copenhagen compare with Singapore on “City Buzz/Wellness”? I wanted to find out, so a friend and I created a new version of the graph, utilizing Tableau Software:

You can view the whole chart here.

Stuart Read spoke this week in PACE about creating a story with our data. Data visualization, when executed correctly and thoughtfully, can look like a piece of art while simultaneously simplifying complex sets of data. Perhaps even more importantly, however, data visualization can tell intriguing stories about the world we live in. The chart below, for example, shows migration to Oregon from across the U.S over the years:

You can interact with the charts here to see where people in every U.S. state are from and where they moved to over the years.

Even something as seemingly mundane as what we call our fizzy beverages across the U.S. can be conveyed persuasively with the right type of graph:

Who knew usage of the term “pop” stretched from Washington and Oregon all the way through the Midwest?! If I were a marketing associate in New York City, I could use this graph to convince executives to label our drink “pop” instead of “soda” in Oregon television commercials.

As you think about your own data story, appreciate that each of these data visualizations contains three core elements:

Clear. Good visualizations are simple enough to be instantly understood by someone unfamiliar with the data. In order to accomplish this level of succinctness, you first have to decide on one or more insights you want to expose in the data, then choose a graph that will best convey your main point(s).

Creative. Each of the visualizations in this article went beyond the simple graphs we all learned in elementary school. Bar graphs, scatter plots, and line graphs serve a purpose, but there are tons of great tools now to create more interesting visualizations! Power BI, Google charts, Tableau, Plotly, Datawrapper–the list goes on and on. Some programs even give their software free to students.

Targeted. Good data visuals are tailored to the audience. Just like you would tailor a presentation style to an audience, so should the visuals.

Data visualization is hard to get right, but when you do, the results are very rewarding. Similar to an author selecting words for their next novel, data visualization requires careful choice of type, color, and complexity. Great data visualization takes complicated, messy numbers and creates an easily understandable, interactive, and beautiful piece of art that tells a story.

Works Cited

Aisch, Gregor, Robert Gebeloff, and Kevin Quealy. “Where We Came From and Where We Went, State by State.” The New York Times, 19 Aug. 2014. Accessed 23 Feb. 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/upshot/where-people-in-each-state-were-born.html

Fink, Elissa. “Do You Say Coke, Soda, or Pop? A Map Visualization Shows Your Likely Answer.” Tableau, 24 Aug. 2008. Accessed 22 February 2019. https://www.tableau.com/fr-fr/blog/do-you-say-coke-soda-or-pop-map-visualization-shows-your-likely-answer

Nguyen, Kelli, Scott Olster, and Andrew Seaman. “NYC outranks SF as best tech city, why Earth may run out of humans, and more top insights.” LinkedIn Daily Rundown, 9 Feb. 2019. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nyc-outranks-sf-best-tech-city-why-earth-may-run-out-top

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

Crack. Snap.

“Kyler” I hissed under my breath, the hairs on my neck standing straight up. He turned to look at me, his pack still dripping from the downpour twenty minutes earlier. The sun was setting behind the Olympics and the temperature was beginning to drop, even in the humid climate.

“What!” He yelled back.

“I think I heard a bear.”

Adrenaline flooded my body, my brain preparing to fight or flee. My muscles tensed. My heart pounded. I forgot my back pain and the water on my eyelashes.

“Emily—look.” He motioned to the rocky riverbed below. From behind the trees, three large elk emerged with a baby trailing behind. I almost collapsed with relief. The stressor subsided, my body calmed, and we kept walking to the campsite.

In life or death situations, stress gives us energy. It makes us powerful. It made our ancestors more likely to survive the bear. But most of us don’t experience life or death situations every day. Instead, we have more mundane stressors—our next exam or a looming presentation at work, for example. And the reaction our ancestors learned can generate negative responses to the types of stress we face today. Sometimes, we experience the same adrenaline as if we are fleeing a bear. Psychologists label this outcome as strain. Strain can make us ill, depressed, or most commonly, unpleasant to be around. But strain does not have to be an inevitable result of stress.

Changing our mindset about stress can change how our bodies react. Normally, when we experience a stressor, our blood vessels constrict. But a recent Harvard study defied the notion that physical reactions are inevitable in a stressful situation. Participants were told by study administrators their body’s response to stress—clammy hands, racing heart, and fast breathing—were positives, preparing their bodies for the situation. The impact of reframing the stress was immediate on the subject’s physical wellbeing. Subjects still experienced secondary symptoms such as fast-paced breathing and sweaty palms, but their blood vessels did not constrict, heart rates stayed normal, and subjects remained relaxed (“Harnessing the upsides of stress”). When encountering a non-life threatening situation, their mind could alter the impact stressors had on their cardiovascular health. Stressors in and of themselves are not the issue. It is our mindset—our negative response to them—that impacts our body.

Contrary to the notion that skydivers are just adrenaline junkies, people who regularly sky-dive have actually honed the ability to have a positive response to an extreme stressor. Instead of reacting negatively to a possible life-threatening situation, they feel delight at the experience.

Redefining our outlook of stress can make all the difference. Next time you experience a stressor, assess whether you’re in a life-threatening situation. If you are, your body has prepared you to run or fight. If you’re not, challenge yourself to see it as your body preparing for a challenge. It might just relax your blood vessels and make you feel better.

Works Cited

“Harnessing the upsides of stress” Harvard Health Publishing. https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/harnessing-the-upsides-of-stress. Accessed 3 January 2019.

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

We are back from break and into our second week of classes! PACE is a yearlong course that integrates many disciplines we study in other classes into our career search and our PACE projects. One of the important topics we covered this week is leadership.

I used to think that to be a leader, I would need to be charismatic. This week, we threw that notion out the window and, through Ashley Nixon’s lecture, learned leadership involves much more than charisma. Which led me to a few questions: Where did my expectation of charisma come from? If charisma is not a requirement, what does it take to be a leader? And how is this useful for us in our PACE projects and moving ahead?

Why did I think charisma was important?

The English word charisma originates from the Greek word, χάρισμα (khárisma), which means “favor” or “gift.” In English, it was originally used in a Christian context to refer to an individual who has received a gift or power from the Holy Spirit for the good of the Church (“Charisma”). Over the years, the meaning has changed to a leader with personal magic or a special magnetic charm. No wonder we all have such difficulty being charismatic! Neither definition gives any indication on how we could become a charismatic leader, though self-help books often claim we should (ex: “Charisma: How to Develop Personal Charisma and Leave that Lasting Impression on Everyone You Meet”).

What does it take to be a (good or great) leader?

We get a lot of input from both PACE and our organizations class, but this came clear to me in a book I recently read. Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy Seals Lead and Win, was written by two former Navy Seals, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. The authors led teams through Ramadi, one of the toughest missions of the Iraq War. Now leadership consultants, Willink and Babin explain how to lead teams through their firsthand accounts on the battlefield. They argue that Extreme Ownership is the idea that “there is no one else to blame; you must own problems along with solutions; commit to lead up and down the chain of command”. In practicing Extreme Ownership, the outcome of the team is the responsibility of all. Other topics covered throughout the book, which I highly recommend anyone part of a team read and internalize, on the “Four Laws of Combat,” including Cover and Move, Prioritize and Execute, Simple, and Decentralized Command (“What is Extreme Ownership?”).

I found it fascinating that no section of the book even touches on charisma as a tenant of leadership. There is no magic bestowed on Navy SEALs. Instead, their leadership is studied, practiced, and employed methodically to achieve outcomes. Leadership is learned, not magic.

How is this useful in PACE projects and moving ahead?

During our PACE projects, team leaders are not chosen by faculty or administration. Instead, it is up to each team to define the structure of their group. It is an opportunity for all of us in the class to study and practice leadership, perhaps even Extreme Ownership, without extreme consequences. Beyond PACE, whether you practice Extreme Ownership or another approach, there are no shortcuts to becoming a great leader. While this may be bad news for some people looking for a magic key, it is good news for the rest of us. We need to practice. We need to learn. And over time we can build ourselves into the great leaders we want to be.

More Information

Link to Tedx Talk on Extreme Ownership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljqra3BcqWM

Works Cited

“Charisma.” Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charisma. Accessed 27 January 2019.

“Charisma: How to Develop Personal Charisma and Leave that Lasting Impression on Everyone You Meet” by Jane Peters 2015.

“What is Extreme Ownership?” Echelon Front, 2014, https://echelonfront.com/what-is-extreme-ownership. Accessed 27 January 2019.

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

In a recent PACE class, we learned how to set goals for ourselves. One of the most profound pieces of information I learned from one of our professors, Ashley Nixon, is that we should only set one or two goals for ourselves at any one time. Below are three tips I’ve learned that could help you set your own goal right now:

Small Steps Lead to Large Results

Ambitious goals are hard to accomplish because they often seem overwhelming. I ran cross country during college and the hardest part of every run was getting out of the door. Logically, the hardest part of the run should be at the end of the run, when I was the most tired. However, I always found that if I persuaded myself to run the first step, then chances are I would run the second, and then the third, and soon I had completed my run. Quite literally, the first step is the hardest.

Similarly, if your goal is to read twelve books a year, then start with reading one word. Persuade yourself to read one word a night. Chances are, you’ll keep reading beyond the first word. Ambitious goals start with small actions.

Set Goals You Can Achieve

Second, I’ve learned to not set goals that I don’t have power over. One of the most common goals set by students is to achieve a certain grade in a class. However, you don’t set your grade—your professor does. What you do have power over is how much you study. You can set a goal to earn an “A”, but if you don’t know the steps to achieve it, then the goal is basically useless. Set a goal to study every night for one hour between now and the end of the semester, and you have a better chance of receiving the A. Even if you don’t receive the A, you learned a lot through your studying.

Make it Time-Bound

Finally, we learned in class to make our goal time-bound. Set a time limit for when you want to accomplish your goal by and give yourself some pressure! A lot of us work best with the end in sight. What if it turns out you hate running, reading, unicycling, or whatever your goal was? You always have the chance to stop, redefine your goal, and start again. By making your goal time-bound, you give yourself permission to change your goal after a certain time if it is no longer working for you.

“He who fails to plan is planning to fail” –Winston Churchill

Humans rarely accomplish amazing things by taking radical steps. Large goals can be achieved through incremental change. Through setting just one goal at a time to make a small change, you can get started on a path to your personal success.

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

Adams, Scott. “Dilbert.” Comic strip. In www.dilbert.com. 2011.

During PACE last week, we divided up into our project teams to create skits to illustrate decision-making biases. We then spent the remainder of the class period presenting our skits to the rest of the class and the class guessed what bias was presented. Below are a few of my favorites I learned last Thursday through the skits and our readings:

The Endowment Effect

The endowment effect is used in behavioral economics to explain why people value a good more highly once they own it. If I receive a free t-shirt from a giveaway, I am more likely to demand a higher price to sell the shirt than I was willing to pay for it in the first place. We tend to overvalue the goods we already own. The endowment effect explains one reason why people try to sell their coffee makers on Facebook for well over what anyone is willing to pay or why some view minimalism as a radical idea.  

One way companies use the endowment effect is through free trials. Free trials enable a customer to use the product or service before paying. The more the customer uses it, the more tied to it they become, and therefore the more likely they are to pay for it once the free trial expires. The customer values the product or service more than they would otherwise through free trial “ownership”.  

The endowment effect is often tied to a second, important bias:  

Loss Aversion

It is difficult to sell that same coffee maker above because of loss aversion. Loss aversion is our tendency to prefer to avoid losses than acquire equivalent gains. Losing the coffee maker will make us sadder than acquiring the same coffee maker will make us happy. As a result, we tend to hold on to the coffee maker.

Companies have to be very careful with their pricing strategies because of loss aversion. Customers are more sensitive to price increases than they are prices decreases. As a simple example, if a company raises the price of a gallon of milk, they could expect demand to decrease. If they lower the price of a gallon of milk, they could expect demand to increase. However, what they might not expect, holding all other things equal, is that the price increase will cause demand to decrease more than the lower price will cause the demand to increase. Our reactions to losses tend to be more emotionally powerful than our reactions to gains.

The Confirmation Bias

The heuristic explained in the Dilbert comic above, the confirmation bias, is when we search for and interpret information to confirm our preexisting beliefs. As cave people, this probably helped us avoid dangerous animals and stay alive—“the bear ate my friend yesterday–I should probably keep avoiding bears or anything that looks like a bear.” However, just like in the comic above, these days our preconceived notions can get in the way of us absorbing new information.

I highly recommend watching an episode of Shark Tank to see this bias in action over and over again. Entrepreneurs frequently continue promoting failed products because they seek out market information that confirms what they want to believe. They then face a harsh reality when Mark Cuban won’t invest in their product. Confirmation bias can prevent entrepreneurs from seeing all of the information available.

Conclusion

Through a game in PACE, we learned these decision-making biases and how they apply to our personal and professional lives. Hopefully, our education will prevent us from falling into the same trap as Dilbert’s coworker.

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

“If this gets bad, it gets bad for <all> of us”.

– Tommy Lee Jones, playing Col Hayes Hodges in the 2000 film “Rules of Engagement”

One of our primary goals in PACE is for a team of five or six smart, ambitious, opinionated MBA students to work together for six months on a project for a not-for-profit organization. Last week, we received our PACE assignments! We are extremely excited to be working with the following organizations and are thankful for their willingness to partner with Atkinson:

• Albertina Kerr
• Children’s Education Theater
• Growing Gardens
• Meals on Wheels People
• Mid-Willamette Valley Literacy Center
• Ride Connection
• Tucker Maxon School
• United Way of the Mid-Willamette Valley
• Willamette West Habitat for Humanity
• Immanuel Lutheran Church
• Salem Health

This week, each team is creating its “Rules of Engagement.” These will help define how each team will interact, outline our values and norms, and establish the conduct we expect from each other. So why do we bother to define our rules of engagement? Wouldn’t it be more time-effective to just launch right into our tasks? These are questions I probably would have asked before beginning my MBA program. However, defining rules of engagement prior to starting the work, though initially time-consuming, can focus the team, manage conflict, and help us coordinate our work.

Focus

Establishing rules of engagement allows us to use process loss effectively. Process loss is what results when teams do not work as effectively as they could. For example, the time we spend talking about your weekend instead of jumping right into the group meeting. The goal of working together is not to minimize process loss. Process loss is an inevitable, and some process loss is actually a positive. For example, talking about our weekend creates group bonding. However, if we spend all our time talking about the weekend, we won’t have time to accomplish our tasks. Our groups must find a balance between accomplishing our tasks and working well as a team.

Manage Conflict

Should a conflict arise (and undoubtedly will at some point) we can reference our rules of engagement. Conflict is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to create a toxic work environment. We will also be learning how to manage conflict in future classes, as the instruction we learn in class often mirrors the stages of our projects.

Coordinate

Finally, and perhaps the most obvious, rules of engagement help us coordinate work. If we launch right into the assignment, without thought on how to communicate, some tasks may be duplicated while others may be forgotten. My team, for example, established that we would use a Kanban board to manage the flow of work and would communicate via text if there were a work emergency. Our rules of engagement meeting helped us establish these strategies.

Keeping this Good … For All of Us

Our cohort is very excited to begin work with the wonderful not-for-profits we are paired with and we are eager to start a yearlong, transformative process, working well with our organizations and our teammates. Stay tuned for updates on our projects!

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.

On Friday, as part of PACE, the entire first-year cohort arrived for our communications workshop. The goal of the workshop was twofold—first, to learn how to become better public speakers, and second, to learn how to tell a cohesive story about ourselves in under two minutes. We each took turns presenting in front of our cohort and afterwards we were critiqued by our professors. A lot of us found it difficult to present, and I imagine that we are not alone in our struggles. So, I offer to you below, some key aspects we took away on Friday:

1. It’s not about you, it’s about your audience

The goal of the speech should be to convey new information to your audience. Instead of asking yourself “Is this what I want to say?” ask yourself “Is this what they want or need to hear?” Focusing on your audience will also enhance your ability to make eye contact and speak naturally. We often are relaxed when we are talking in a small group or one-on-one. However, when we present, we become nervous. As a coping mechanism, we try to focus on what we’re saying rather than the spectators. If we remind ourselves that we just want to tell the audience something they don’t know, it suddenly becomes much easier to make eye contact and move naturally around the room.

2. Tell a story

One way to tell your story is to take a tip from children’s literature. It might seem silly, but the best stories follow the same concepts as our favorite children’s books. For me, The Very Hungry Caterpillar reminds me of a simple narrative to follow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXHScpo_Vv8). It has an exposition—the caterpillar exists and is hungry. It has a rising action—the caterpillar is eating everything from cheese to pickles. And it has a dramatic conclusion—the caterpillar turns into a butterfly. You can add complex characters, more details, or conflict, but a great place to start is to follow the same structure as this children’s tale.

3. But, make sure your story is cohesive

Your story should flow together, like a good book or your favorite TV show. Only add in the details that make the story really remarkable and discard those that are not necessary. If you’re telling a story about your work experience, you do not need to explain every job you’ve ever had or the details already found on your resume. Narrow in on just a few ideas. If the audience wants to know more about a particular part of your story, they’ll often ask you after your speech.

4. Add some humor

The best speeches we listened to on Friday made us laugh. If you can make your audience laugh, they will remember you. One of my favorite speeches made a joke about The Wizard of Oz. Remember that audiences can be nervous too. In fact, they can be just as nervous watching someone present as you are onstage. Diffuse that tension with some light humor and you’ll make yourself and your audience feel better.  

The most valuable information I learned on Friday is that it’s really hard to give speeches! Almost no one does it right the first time and everyone has parts they wish they could improve. Learning these tips and tricks has helped me start improving my public speaking skills and I hope next time you give a speech, you will feel more confident too.

Emily Anderson is a first-year MBA candidate at Willamette University. She is a 2017 graduate of Gonzaga University, where she received her B.A. in International Studies. Emily enjoys PACE because of the opportunity to learn valuable career information, improve her analytical and speaking skills, and build partnerships with not-for-profits in Oregon.