OML 6200 Module 4 Final Paper: A Plan to Make a Difference at Work, at Home and in the Community Example

Three Experiments and a Promise: A Supervisor's Plan to Lead at Work, at Home and in the Community

Student Name

M.S. in Management in Organizational Leadership, Thomas Edison State University

OML-6200: Organizational Management and Leadership II

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Experiments and a Promise: A Supervisor's Plan to Lead at Work, at Home and in the Community

Purpose

I began this course as a production supervisor whose practical skills had outrun his moral and intellectual ones. My Module 1 paper closed by promising that I would find out what my people are dealing with before judging their work. My Module 3 dialogues showed gaps between my stated values and my behavior: I hoard night calls instead of developing my lead hands, and I am home without being present. This paper sets out how I will make a significant difference as a leader in the next year, at work, at home and in my community, and how I will know whether I have.

The Approach: Small Experiments

Friedman (2008) argues that leaders create change by acting with creativity, which he calls being innovative: designing small, low-risk experiments that improve performance in all four domains of life, work, home, community and self, at once. He calls these four-way wins. An experiment has a clear goal, a defined period, measures of success and the support of key stakeholders. If it fails, the leader learns and tries another; if it succeeds, it becomes a new way of doing things.

This approach suits me. My strength is practical, and experiments are practical. They also respect the insight in Coles (2000) that moral leadership grows through action and contact rather than through declarations. Coles's leaders did not plan to become moral examples; they acted, and were changed by what they saw. Experiments put me in places where I can see.

Greenhaus and Powell (2006) proposed a theory of work-family enrichment: experiences in one role can improve performance and quality of life in another, through skills, confidence, energy and social resources that carry over. Friedman's four-way wins are a practical application of that idea, and each experiment below is designed to let gains in one domain feed another.

Experiment 1: Lead Hands Who Can Cover Nights

Goal: Train my two lead hands, Marisol and Dev, to handle the plant's night calls about machine breakdowns and staffing, so that I am called only for safety incidents.

Design: For eight weeks, each lead hand will shadow me on night calls for two weeks, then handle calls with me available by phone for four weeks, then handle them alone for two weeks. We will meet for twenty minutes each Friday to review the week's calls.

Measures: Number of night calls I receive, which now averages nine a week; lead hands' confidence, rated by each on a 1 to 10 scale at the start and end; and response time to breakdowns, which must not rise.

Four-way benefits: At work, two people develop leadership skills and the plant gains depth, which my plant manager asked for in our dialogue. At home, I sleep through most nights and am present at dinner. In the community, I have the energy for Saturday clinics. For myself, I recover the sleep I have lost for three years.

Risks: Lead hands may make mistakes. Friedman stresses that experiments are designed to be safe to fail; my phone will stay on for the first six weeks, and safety calls will always come to me.

Experiment 2: A Saturday Soccer Clinic With My Son and the Plant

Goal: Run a free Saturday morning soccer clinic for younger players in the league for six weeks this spring, with my twelve-year-old son as an assistant coach and four volunteers from the plant.

Design: The clinic will run from 9 to 10:30 a.m. on the league's fields, focused on basic skills for 6 to 8 year olds whose teams lack experienced coaches. My son will lead one drill station each week. I will invite plant employees who have children in the league or who played soccer to help.

Measures: Number of children attending, the number of plant volunteers who help, my son's own rating of the experience and whether at least one plant volunteer agrees to coach a team next season.

Four-way benefits: In the community, younger players get coaching they lack. At home, I spend Saturday mornings with my son doing something he chose, which my wife named as what matters most. At work, I get to know plant employees outside the shift, which builds the relationships Coles describes as the root of moral authority. For myself, I return to something I love.

This experiment draws on Module 2's lesson. Leading volunteers taught me to persuade rather than command; inviting plant employees as volunteers lets them see me lead without authority, and lets me see them as more than their jobs.

Experiment 3: The Monthly Shift Conversation

Goal: Hold a monthly fifteen-minute one-on-one conversation with each of my 34 shift employees, not about performance, but about how things are going for them at work and outside it, if they choose to share.

Design: I will schedule two conversations each shift day, so each person is seen once a month. I will ask three questions: What is working? What is in your way? Is there anything you are carrying that I should know about? I will write down any action I promise and close it within two weeks.

Measures: Percentage of conversations held as scheduled; number of promised actions closed on time; and our shift's results on two questions the plant already asks in its annual survey: "My supervisor cares about me as a person" and "I can raise a problem without fear."

Four-way benefits: At work, I learn what my people are carrying before it becomes an attendance problem, the failure I described with the sander operator. In the community, several employees coach or volunteer, and I can connect them to the league. At home, I practice the listening my wife asked for. For myself, I keep the promise that opened this course.

Simons (2002) found that employees judge leaders by the alignment between words and deeds. This experiment is the deed that matches my word. Walumbwa et al. (2008) included relational transparency among the components of authentic leadership; these conversations practice it every week.

Stakeholder Support

Friedman insists that experiments need the explicit support of key stakeholders. Before starting, I will present each experiment to the people it affects. My plant manager has already approved Experiment 1 and will pay for the hours Marisol and Dev spend learning. The league board will need to approve field use for the clinic, and my wife and son will decide with me which Saturdays work. For Experiment 3, I will explain the conversations to the whole shift at a start-of-shift meeting, so no one thinks they are being singled out, and I will make clear that sharing anything personal is optional.

What Could Go Wrong

Three risks cut across the experiments. First, time: thirty-four conversations a month, eight weeks of night-call training and a six-week clinic add hours in the short term before they save any. I will drop the least useful element of each experiment after the first month rather than let the plan crowd out sleep, which would defeat its purpose. Second, trust: some employees may suspect the shift conversations are a way to gather information for discipline. Simons's research suggests that such suspicion fades only when deeds match words over time, so I will never use what I hear in a conversation against anyone, and I will say so. Third, my own habits: the need for control that surfaced in Module 3 could turn experiments meant to develop others into more work for me. My lead hands and my wife have agreed to tell me when they see it.

The Fourth Domain: Self

The plan says little about the fourth domain, self, and that is only partly deliberate. Friedman counts the self, health, mind and spirit, as a domain that supports all the others. Sleep is my most pressing need, which Experiment 1 addresses, and I will add one more commitment: a thirty-minute walk three mornings a week with no phone, the only part of the plan that is purely for me.

Creativity and the Conditions for It

Friedman places creativity at the center of the fourth module: leaders must be willing to try new ways of doing things. Amabile (1998) argued that creativity in organizations depends on expertise, creative thinking skills and motivation, and that managers often kill creativity by controlling too tightly and allowing too little time. I see the same risk in my own experiments. If I control every night call, Marisol and Dev will never learn to judge. If I fill every Saturday morning with drills, my son will not want to come back. Part of the creativity this plan requires is mine: letting others shape the experiments.

I will therefore ask Marisol and Dev to redesign the night call process after the first month, ask my son to choose one drill each week and ask my shift employees, in the monthly conversations, what they would change about how we work.

Coles and the Larger Purpose

The course began with Coles's question of what makes a leader real. His leaders, Robert Kennedy among them, were changed by what they saw and acted on it. My scale is small, a shift, a family and a youth league, but Coles shows that moral leadership is not limited by scale. Dorothy Day's influence began in soup lines. The difference I can make is in those small places, and it depends on whether I see people clearly enough to act.

I also recognize the limits. Coles writes about leaders who paid real costs for what they did. My experiments carry little risk. That is by design, because Friedman's method starts small, but if the experiments succeed, the next step should ask more of me: perhaps running for the township recreation board, or proposing a plant-wide mentoring program for new lead hands.

Lessons From the Course

Looking back over the four modules, the largest change in my thinking is that leadership is not a role I step into at the plant door. Coles's leaders were the same people at home, in their communities and in public life, and Friedman's four domains make the same point in practical terms. The plan reflects that: none of the three experiments belongs to one domain alone.

Timeline

How I Will Evaluate the Plan

After four months, I will review all three experiments with the same stakeholders I spoke with in Module 3: my plant manager, my wife and the league board. Friedman recommends asking stakeholders directly whether the experiments helped them, rather than relying only on one's own measures. I will also redo my four-way view of attention. If work's share has fallen from 60 percent and the other domains have grown without hurting results at work, the plan has worked.

I will be honest about failures. Friedman treats a failed experiment as information, and Coles shows that leaders grow from confronting what they did not see. If the shift conversations feel forced, I will change the questions or ask employees how to improve them, rather than abandoning them.

Conclusion

This plan turns the course into three experiments I can begin next week. Each draws on what I learned: Coles's moral leadership as attention, Friedman's principles of being real, whole and innovative, and research on integrity, authenticity, enrichment and creativity. Together they are designed to make a difference at work, by developing people and learning what they carry; at home, by being present; and in the community, by teaching children and bringing plant employees into the league. The promise that opened the course, to notice people, is no longer only a promise. It has a schedule, measures and people who will tell me whether I kept it.

References

Amabile, T. M. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 76(5), 76-87.

Coles, R. (2000). Lives of moral leadership. Random House.

Friedman, S. D. (2008). Total leadership: Be a better leader, have a richer life. Harvard Business School Press.

Greenhaus, J. H., & Powell, G. N. (2006). When work and family are allies: A theory of work-family enrichment. Academy of Management Review, 31(1), 72-92. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2006.19379625

Simons, T. (2002). Behavioral integrity: The perceived alignment between managers' words and deeds as a research focus. Organization Science, 13(1), 18-35. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.13.1.18.543

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307308913