Week 5, Blog #4

In the web lecture, Democracy and Dialogue, professor discusses the concept of dialogic democracy. I agree that this type of democracy can be beneficial to an organization because of its emphasis on collaboration and true communication, which in my mind includes active listening. Giving those in a collaborative group a voice goes a long way to organizational effectiveness. I have also found that it is essential for collaborative groups to clearly state their goals and objectives. Once these are established, I believe that it is critical that the collaborative group be ably led and facilitated so that a “free-for-all” situation does not develop.

Week 5, Blog #3

The authors’ discussion of mindful and mindless approaches to organizational communication in Chapter 11 reminded of me of an experience I had at work a few years ago. It was early January, and I had just arrived at work. On my way into the office, I ran into a colleague that I worked with occasionally, but not very often. Just to make small talk, I asked her if she had had a good “holiday” (I purposely said “holiday” because our organization had been very specific about respecting others’ religious beliefs (i.e., being politically correct). I also thought that by using this word, it could be construed as New Year’s Day, since that was a holiday that had just past too). Her response was, “I don’t celebrate Christmas”. I realized it wasn’t worth my time to confront the ignorance of her response, so I wound up re-phrasing my question to something like did she have a good time off, just to get past it. I find it rather ironic that trying to be mindful in this mindless or phatic communication scenario didn’t really pay off for me.