Organizational Behavior and Leadership
The primary artifact for this course required our class to take an in-depth look at an organization of our choice and develop a plan to address issues that may be detrimental to their growth. My group chose to take a look at the North Carolina Cooperative Extension and focus on some issues that could help improve our brand on a local, state, and national scale. Select the “Primary Artifact” button below to view the final video for this course in another window or just press the play button below to view it. A summary of the course and a reflection on the artifact is below as well.
Author: Lee Brimmage and Chad Ray
Date: October 8, 2020
PRT 506 Final Presentation - Primary Artifact
PRT 506 | Fall 2020
Blacklands Tour | Agriculture Program Staff
Summary
This course really delved down deep into understanding behavior and leadership on all levels of an organization and why it is important to the success of a company. The Four Frames approach (Structural, Human, Political, Cultural) introduced by Bolman and Deal was heavily focused on during this course and has been an extremely useful resource in analyzing organizations and their effectiveness. Before this course, I never understood the reasoning behind corporations decision making strategies or how they came to certain conclusions about things, but this course help clarify the thought process that may take place. The Organizational Behavior and Leadership course was a very fun and engaging course! Dr. Jason Bocarro is extremely enthusiastic and passionate about not only teaching his students, but also learning from them as well! His curiousity to learn and engage with his class is contagious and creates a very welcoming environment. Throughout my learning career, discussion boards have always been hit or miss, but this class had one of the best discussion boards I’ve ever been a part of! It was extremely thorough and I learned so much from my peers! I liked how Dr. Bocarro consistently showed up to each and every class meeting with genuine excitement to teach course materials, encourage learning from our peers, and challenge us to think outside of the box! I always appreciated his efforts in providing very thorough feedback for every assignment as it proved to be beneficial moving forward in the class and the program. I enjoyed this course and I believe Dr. Bocarro is an incredible professor and a huge asset to not only the PRTM program, but the College of Natural Resources and the Parks and Recreation community as well!
4-H Summer Camp | Team Building Activity
Reflection
Every organization in the world is always searching for new ways to improve and maintain an acceptable level of success. This course really helped me to understand the best practices needed to ensure that an organizations is operating at it’s highest potential. When our final project was introduced in this course, my partner Chad Ray and I decided to thoroughly analyze our current workplace - North Carolina Cooperative Extension. Though our organization has experienced tremendous success in the past, we wanted to assist with addressing issues that could help us become even better in the future. This final project allowed us the opportunity to have in-depth conversations with our State Leaders and really assess issues from numerous perspectives. It was quite refreshing to see the impact our organization has had and the steps we are taking to move forward. I believe we both walked away from this assignment with a greater appreciation for the efforts of our coworkers, leaders, volunteers, and other personnel of our organization as well as better insight on how we can be part of the solution to some of our problems. Researching other organizations also enlightened me to the fact that they experience some of the same issues as well! Some of the most successful brands in the world are faced with problems that are in need of the Four Frames approach to properly resolve it. Moving forward I will always use this approach to assess our organization or any others that I am part of. The motto of our 4-H program is “To Make The Best Better” and I believe this course has given me the tools and resources to continue to have a positive impact through accurate evaluations of issues and innovative solutions. The concepts of this course will always stick with me!
