After reading Box 4.10 I thought about some memorable messages at my organization. I do recall a message in a newsletter from a supervisor I had worked for. I had worked for him for about one year. He had been newly promoted and turned out to be a very fair and decisive leader. In this newsletter, he was saying farewell to the organization after 25+ years of service. As you read the letter you could see that he had experienced a lot in the organization. The places and assignments that he had worked made you think, “boy, what a great time he had”.
For the last 3 years he had been a helicopter pilot for the department and prior to that he was a motorcycle officer for 5 years. Although I'm not a pilot or ride a motorcycle, he made the assignments seem rather exciting and out of the norm. His final words were, "can you image I was getting paid to do this?"
We were obviously reading a message from someone who had fulfilled his goal of making his job a career filled with enjoyment and satisfaction. The personal message being delivered was a part of the organizational communication stream and it filled with satisfaction, enjoyment, pride, and accomplishment. That's the message I got from it. Interestingly enough, during his career he had been passed up for promotions several times and was bitter for a few years. I guess in the end the snapshot of our time with the organization is much better than we experienced. Maybe we just want to be retiring from a really good place.
Streaning Star Trek: Insurrection Full Movie
6 years ago
1 comment:
I first read Stohl's work when I was a graduate student at University of Kentucky. Her focus on memorable messages resonated with me because I could so easily identify such messages in my own organizational experiences. Her article was published in 1986, the year I took a graduate seminar in organizational culture. I wonder the extent to which her findings hold true today. For example, she found that organization members tended to recall official organizational messages produced in ambiguous situations. With organization members now more accustomed to producing messages (blogs, webpages, email), it seems to me that informal communication may now play a greater role in memorable messages.
Post a Comment