Beginning the exploration

I'm M, and I'm going to be starting grad school for business ethics and leadership in January. I'm using this blog to post my thoughts and ideas about what I've learned prior to beginning the program, and how that evolves as I progress through it.

My main interests at this point in time are: emotional intelligence in the workplace, partnerships between for-profit and non-profit organizations, and building healthy working relationships within the global economy. These are the areas I expect to explore during my program, and I hope to focus on one or more of them as my school and work careers progress.

It's been a long journey from leaving my previous career in music to beginning this grad program. I'm posting my application essay below by way of explanation:

Describe your background and interests. Explain why you wish to pursue the degree for which you are applying and what you hope to accomplish in this degree program. (3 - 5 pages)

________________

-History-

My educational background is in music. I hold both a bachelors and a masters of music in vocal performance from a well-known music conservatory. I received my masters in 1995 at the age of 23.

After finishing school, I started auditioning for opera companies and performing. To supplement these activities, I taught myself HTML and Photoshop and began designing web pages for a living.

As I began to mature, it became undeniably clear to me that values, ethics, and personal boundaries in the opera community were not only underdeveloped, but often offensive and sometimes legally questionable. Verbal abuse, sexual harassment and other questionable behaviors were not only tolerated, but often condoned and defended. Add to this the fierce competition and often arbitrary and discriminatory standards by which work was procured, and I began to question my choice of an operatic career.

Conversely, as a result of my work in churches singing sacred music, I began to experience the transformative contribution music provides to people in a spiritual setting, when it is stripped of the ego-driven trappings of the world of professional performance.

My interest in the use of music in personal development led me to consider social work and counseling as possible career paths. I’ve read a great deal about the field of psychology and different schools of psychological thought. Feeling an affinity for Jungian psychology, I considered integrating my artistic experience with a psychological practice, perhaps in the field of music therapy or expressive arts therapy.

I have also considered entering the Unitarian ministry, a field of work where I felt like I could make a contribution to society.

In my post-college years, I have worked primarily in web design. Since teaching myself to code and design web sites in 1997, I have worked as a freelancer, contractor, and employee. My language study at the conservatory gave me skills that translated well for learning scripting, and computer graphic design was a good outlet for my artistic leanings.

While I was resistant to taking on supervisory and administrative roles while I was pursuing an operatic career, after re-evaluating this choice I began taking more leadership roles at work.

-Recent Development-

In 2001, I was hired at a large technology company to fill a newly created position, Web Production Artist. The philosophy at my company has encouraged me to identify and develop my personal strengths and capacities in a way that expands my job skills and increases my benefit to the company. As a result, my position has grown to include project management, training, documentation, and localization coordination.

Over the past two years, I have continued to investigate my areas of interest in social work and counseling. To that end I served as a community sponsor for the mentoring program with a local non-profit. This entailed acting as supervisor and mentor to a group of girls at a high school who ran a girls club at a middle School. I had great hopes of doing some good, connecting with the girls on a deep level, and providing them with a confident and competent role model. As is often the case when one approaches a new situation with such an idealistic pre-set agenda, I learned more about my weaknesses than my strengths, and more about what areas I did not want to pursue than those I did.

I found the non-profit world to be incredibly frustrating, lacking in direction, deficient in measuring success, and very short-sighted when it comes to funding, planning and delivering results. I enjoyed working with the girls, but found a huge gap between the unrealistic and untested expectations of the organization, and what my group was actually trying to accomplish. The non-profit required that I enforce a highly structured process with excessive documentation and very little flexibility. In essence, we were asked to micro-manage our charges. After initially trying to enforce this structure to the detriment of my relationship with my girls, I switched approaches and created a much more flexible program, which encouraged the girls to innovate and adapt the curriculum whenever the situation warranted it, and to take responsibility in a more vertical (interdependent) fashion, as opposed to a horizontal (hierarchical) one.

Over the last ten years I had also observed my mother in the conception of, creation and disappointment in a non-profit she started in my hometown. Her board was plagued by differences in perception of the mission of the organization. Often it seemed as if the mission was secondary to the fundraising activities of the organization. The legal structure of the nonprofit made it virtually impossible for her to keep the founding goals and values intact in the organization, despite a huge community need for services. The group I worked with seemed plagued by different but related problems.

It seems to me that while corporations can be incredibly effective organisms, self-sustaining, efficient, and profitable, they often lack “soul” in the form of social responsibility, environmental awareness, and appreciation of their employees as individuals, not just expendable and replaceable resources. On the flip side, non-profits are often all heart and no mind. They can be inefficient, with no quantifiable goals or bottom line, and are frequently bogged down by several organizers or board members who “think with their hearts,” have varying personal reasons for their involvement in the organization, and pull in different directions, creating entropy.

In 2005 my company sent me to an industry convention where I attended a panel on the partnership between the Livestrong Foundation and Nike. Livestrong provides an example of a successful non-profit that has taken a traditionally for-profit approach to creating brand, identity, and targeting their services to their audience. I found this very inspiring, especially in light of what I’d been observing as my time with the non-profit was drawing to a close. My interest in the potentialities of the relationship between non-profits and corporate sponsors was piqued.

In learning the ropes of the corporate world, I feel I have the potential to excel there. My manager has encouraged me to consider moving into management. I feel I would be an asset in that area. After the chaotic and largely boundary-less world of opera, I find the waters of the corporate world to be easier to swim and far less perilous by contrast.

Initially, I avoided involving myself in the politics of my workplace, spending more energy ingratiating myself with my superiors, and usually considering any stance I took in that light. I also felt that in my current position and potential job path, my chances of making a real contribution through my work were small. I did not yet see a way in which I could combine my talents in the workplace and my desire to do good in my community.

Recently, however, when an upper-management decision seemed ill-considered and potentially destructive, I experienced an epiphany of sorts. I decided to publicly stand up for what I knew was right, and articulate what I knew the rest of my group was concerned about, but were afraid to express. While this put my working relationship with my boss on the line, it also allowed me to be authentic and clear in a way I had avoided up until then. The act of standing up for what I believed in an authentic way has changed my perspective on my role and my potential in the corporate environment. It has also motivated me to document my career development, write a proposal for a new position that fits my duties much better than my current job description, and to shop this proposal to my managers. As a result, I expect to be promoted by the end of the year.

I was introduced to the MSOLE program by a psychologist I met recently. Reading the description of the program and the curriculum, I found it to be very much in line with my interests at this stage of my career and personal development. Ethical leadership, ethical business, and social responsibility are pivotal concepts to me, and are areas in which I feel I can make a valuable contribution and excel.

-Goals-

The three areas I intend to investigate further as I develop my future career plan are 1) community relations with non-profits in the corporate sector, 2) internationalization and globalization issues in the workplace, and 3) the development of emotional intelligence within organizations.

While some corporations find ways to create prosperity and change for the better, other corporations, faced with moral quandaries, make horribly bad decisions that negatively impact the lives of many. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, WalMart was more effective at reaching and helping those in need than our government agencies. In contrast, faced with the possibility of a bird-flu pandemic, the pharmaceutical company that holds the patent on Tamiflu refused to even consider licensing the drug patent to other companies until international pressure threatened their reputation.

The world is in the midst of a change from a nation-based power structure to a corporate-based structure. Corporations are behind most successful politicians, and they drive change, development, and prosperity. But, they have limited incentives to demonstrate ethical, moral or responsible treatment of the people they employ and supply, and the communities in which they operate. Government has had limited success in imposing such values as corporations can afford better lawyers than governments can. Effective institutional change will have to be generated from within the corporation itself, not from without.

I am very motivated to explore my own sense of ethics, my strengths, and my leadership potential. The MSOLE program will help me define and develop my own strengths and better articulate my own internal sense of ethics so that I can use my skills more effectively in the workplace and in my community.