Find below is one essay out of three that are required for E MBA at university of washington. It would be great if any one can review my essay for corrections.
Describe a situation in a work environment that either severely strained your relationship with co-workers or challenged your personal values. How did you resolve the situation?
It happened when I was year and a half into my professional job experience and had taken the initiative to train my colleague, who was fresh out of college. My high levels of expectations coupled with inadequate people skills had caused a severe strain between us. Being naturally passionate about delivering the optimal amount of work in the most efficient way, I made efforts to minimize his distractions. Making my colleague the best addition to the team is what I had envisioned. This anticipation exerted unintended pressure on him making it difficult to reach his objectives. Observing that he was not comprehending and delivering at the required pace, it was necessary to reevaluate the circumstances and devise a solution. At that time I explored two options to relieve him of the pressure. Giving support and encouragement to make him excel at the current position was one choice. The second one was to find an alternate role. Realizing that the former was not sustainable and the latter not immediate, a transition plan was devised to better utilize the available time.
Immediately, I apologized to him for the strain created by my expectations and then expressed my desire to understand his learning style. At that point, he also expressed the anxiety he was experiencing for not being able to deliver the tasks in a timely manner. We spend two productive months meeting once a week after work to discuss his interests and aspirations to find a suitable role. His strengths and weaknesses became evident during this period. This geared us to conclude that he was more aligned to a role in Quality Assurance than in Development. A training schedule was created to launch him into the new sphere of work. Upon completion of his training, he joined the QA team. Shortly, thereafter his progress was apparent which made me realize that identifying the interests of individuals and placing them in right role yields high performance. Today my colleague is leading a team in quality assurance. This experience has helped me to relate with Ricardo Sempler, who has shown the world how to significantly improve performance by restructuring relationships with people. There is so much to learn about the dynamics of leading people, I had since then started reading books on related topics. In addition, I continued to grow from observing the practices of other successful leaders around me.
Dale Carnegie once said "People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing". As I reflect today this bares more truth than ever before. I learned that one should not expect an individual to perform at one's own level of dedication. Each person has his own skill sets, priorities and perspectives in life. So, while working with them, we need to be sure not to either overburden them or to under utilize their abilities. Moreover, Individuals contribution varies based on their potential and the challenge is to get the best out of them. Although not comprehensive, these simple things would help create a happy work force.
Your essay is coming along fine, though I did find a few things;
My high levels of expectations coupled with inadequate people skills had caused a severe strain between us.Nicely said!
Making my colleague the best addition to the team was what I had envisioned.
This anticipation exerted unintended pressure on him making it difficult for him to reach his objectives.
Giving support and encouragement to make him excel at his current position was one choice.
We spent two productive months meeting once a week after work to discuss his interests and aspirations to find a suitable role.
So, while working with them, we need to be sure not to either overburden them or to under utilize their abilities. Moreover, anind ividual's contribution varies based on their potential...
