 Goal-Setting Questionnaire

Goal Setting

The changes in my beliefs and values after reading Chapter 19 and 20 of Evan and Ward had little

impact on situational realities of the dynamics of the environments I have worked in and the processes that had

to be occurred as a result of those processes. The information in the assessment as well as the re-reading in the

text gave a summary of 30 years of reading management books and focused the application on Library

management systems specifically and resources that related to those systems, but until I have worked in a

system or different systems in Library sciences, it will be hard to compare the cultures, behaviors and politics of

those individual structures and individual environments and the people that embody those elements.

 How is Your Organization Managed?

How is your organization managed?

Most good business leaders agree that entering an environment and listening and learning to the people

who already inhabit those environments will give the best result of understanding an organizations history,

mission, vision, goals and values. The duration of tenure will often speak to the challenge of change and

advancement and entrenched policies of “This is the way we have always done it”, instead of reviewing best

practices against current operational methods and procedures that may have to expand or improve based on

targets and goals that have been established in new plans from year-to-year.

 Diagnosing Poor Performance and Enhancing Motivation

 Managing Diversity

Diagnosing Poor Performance and Enhancing Motivation

Finding out within environments what motivates individuals from diverse backgrounds from

Management Basics for Information Professionals (Evans and Ward, 2007), “Managing Diversity” – (Chapter

4), “Motivation” (Chapter 13), “Power, Authority and Responsibility” – (Chapter 9), and Leadership (Chapter

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14) we learn that different elements of management come into play and the ‘art’ of management vs. the pseudo-

science of management takes reading, being informed, flexibility of options as applied to people and

environments and finally a little common sense of treating people with as much kindness as possible in your

endeavors to get people to help you accomplish goals bigger than one person alone can do, and do it in a way

that allows the maximum amount of happiness to all participants to work on an project, whether fully agreeing

or committing to its purpose(s) or not.

 Assessing Your Mental Abilities

Assessing Your Mental Abilities

Summary: Research spanning 50 years has identified ten primary mental abilities.

Behavior Category Your Answer

1. visualization Very Descriptive of Me
2. clever and uncommon responses Very Descriptive of Me
3. formulate hypotheses Very Descriptive of Me
4. remember unrelated material Very Descriptive of Me
5. remembering items Not Very Descriptive of Me
6. manipulate numbers, arithmetic Not Descriptive of Me
7. fast in comparison Very Descriptive of Me
8. reason from stated premises Very Descriptive of Me
9. spacial patterns Somewhat Descriptive of Me
10. vocabulary Very Descriptive of Me
Source: Adapted
form M.D. Dunnette (Ed.), Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Chicago:
Rand McNally, 1976), pp. 481-483. Copyright 1976 by Rand McNally

Assessing My Mental Abilities

In assessing mental abilities it seems that an intelligence test is being given to approximate the ability to

manage people. Smart people sometimes do ‘dumb things’ and intelligence has little to do with the ‘soft skills’

of people skills. Often, the smarter a person is the less patient and tolerant they may be of others that do not

have those same ‘smarts’. It is important that underlings have respect for a manager, so having a group

interview the manager as well as mangers interviewing groups of people can be an important dynamic of

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groups. I am reminded of a Vice President I placed at Oracle Corporation and their group trip to Las Vegas to

bond as a group. The V.P. had won at the craps table several times and the group was giddy with his success and

quite drunk on the pleasures of winning. He remembers distinctly a demarcation point where he could feel the

ominous pack mentality close in and they began to call for him to take bigger and bigger risks, almost seeming

to want him to lose. He set an appropriate boundary, set a limit on his risks and pulled out while ahead. The

group seemed disappointed at the time, but later had great respect for his prudence and self-control. Had things

gone the other way, he would probably have been derided as a fool and a ‘sucker’ for going along with group

pressure and influence (wanting to ‘please the crowd’).

 Managerial Leadership Behavior Questionnaire

Managerial Leadership Behavior Questionnaire

It seems the assessment of managerial leadership behaviors section of the assessment is included more

to ask questions and see how you feel about the answers than any real gauge of what the answers mean. A

general conclusion is reached at the end of the twenty-three questions that states; Not all twenty-three are

important in any given situation. Typically less than half of these behaviors are associated with effective

performance in particular situations; thus there is no "right" or "wrong" set of responses on this questionnaire.

These behavior categories and your response to the related question are shown below. To me, it is pointless to

ask a rhetorical question or give non-directional assessments without a conclusion that re-enforces an outcome.

 Using Teams

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 Using Teams

Based on research conducted by J. Richard Hackman and others, all of the responses are false.

Examine your responses to see which items you responded to incorrectly. Focus your attention on learning why

the answers are what they are.

I liked this survey because it “set me up.” The fact that all of the statements were false and that I only

strongly disagreed or disagreed with the positive statements showed me two things. One, I was ‘hedging’ and

not going with my instincts. Two, that as I answered these questions, it became highly relevant which

environment and experience I had had to delineate what situational problems had come up in past groups and

the dynamics that entailed. The training of groups to act and work like groups given by Dr. Haycock in his

LIBR203 presentation would act as a good training facility for groups to understand the expectations, the

dynamics and the process that groups typically go through the achieve success in working as group. There are

many challenges, dynamics and hurdles to successfully working in group environments, all too often little

instruction and training is given and people are thrown together and expected to succeed with little direction,

this section of the assessment re-enforces my feelings that training to work in groups is a critical component for

group interaction success.

 Understanding Control

Understanding Control

This was actually my favorite assessment module. It speaks loudly of the antiquated ideology of Type

‘A’ beauracratic organizations and the faulty thinking in managing people and groups under old thought

processes and environments that no longer exist in many global environments. The millennial generation of the

last twenty years is and had shaken up the way organizations attract, maintain and retain employees. The

internet and the distribution of work across large geographical areas and the distribution of work away from

centralized work areas has an impact on place, space and managing virtual environments. Some of the control

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features of past organizational structures can be kept in place through internal and external control mechanisms

like ‘timers’ on work sessions, pop-ups that monitor worker productivity and ‘pinging’ and employee to make

sure they are in fact on their computer terminal and doing something. But on the other side of this oppressive

mechanisms to productivity, people look for the freedom to just get the work done in their own time frame

within a defined deadline and will seek less repressive work environments once they have a taste of productivity

freedom away from old control work sets.

 Defining Quality and Productivity

Defining Quality and Productivity

Again, I see within these answers disagreement from the age of the mind-set and the definitions that

require absolute answers or inflexibility in response. I can think of at least two examples for each answer that

the assessment says my answer is incorrect, that in the real world, the answers provided by the assessments are

incorrect. Like most things in life, perception and exceptions are more of a rule than given credit for in these

types of evaluations. The test-givers are often academic without the proper exposure to real-world applications.

Across the broad generalizations may work to fit answers with generic outcomes, but as noted by Dr. Speller,

what is perceived and instituted as fact is often very fluid in real-world environments.