University of Maryland, College Park

Pearl Diving Assignment 3

Victor Chambliss

Communication for Project Managers: ENCE424

Dr. Shana Webster-Trotman

November 21, 2020

Introduction

As I go throughout the semester, I am learning more and more about the importance of
communication. Recently, we have been learning about emails and how to correctly write them.
You want to make sure that you are not giving off an aggressive tone and that you double check
your grammar. We have seen many examples in class of people emailing recruiters with terrible
grammar and speaking in a tone as if they are talking with a friend. After critiquing their emails
and revising them, has reminded me how important communications skills are and they are truly
something that you can work on. From everything we have learned this semester, I feel that I am
getting closer to becoming a very good communicator. In this essay, I will do the following:
write an email to my team addressing their lackluster performance and the need for
improvement, discuss an important concept that I learned in class this past week, discuss how I
will respond to a boss that calls me an “idiot”, and then discuss my Big Five Personality
Assessment results in relation to my Jung personality profile and DISC assessment results.

Email To Team

Hey Team!

I hope everyone is doing well. I just wanted to reach out to you all about the recent
performance that our team has had because I believe there is a lot of room for improvement. I
have noticed recently that motivation and effort has been down and it has been having a big
effect on the performance and efficiency of our team. I know that this pandemic has been hard
on us all and there may be things stressing you out that may affect your job performance but we
need to pull it together somehow. You all are very talented individuals and there is no one else
that I would rather have on my team. I know that we have the potential to be a really great team
but I need you all to work with me. If you need help in any way please do not hesitate to reach
out to me or another team member. I would like to have a team meeting soon where we discuss
these issues and get any input from you all on what you think is working and vice versa.

Let me know if there is anything that I can do to help you all. If you think there is
anything that I can change differently, please bring that information to our meeting that will be
scheduled soon. Thanks!

Sincerely,

Victor Chambliss

Important Concepts

I have been learning a lot of important concepts in the classroom in the past weeks. I
would like to discuss the past two weeks where we watched the video of the angry boss Ong and
then did a critique of several different emails. When watching the video on Ong, my team and I
noticed a few things that could have gone better. For one, everyone on that team was
dysfunctional in some way and they all had different perceptions about the other team members
that affected how they interacted with each other. Ong was dysfunctional because he was very
combative and was always aggressive in his tone and demands. He would always yell at the
team members and treat them like dirt. Christopher was dysfunctional because he was passive
and unmotivated. He would always make excuses for why he wasn’t getting his work done and
wouldn’t plan ahead to get his work done. Rachel was dysfunctional because she was
lackadaisical and Yvonne was not very team oriented. Yvonne was only done with her work and
didn’t help the others when she could have. From looking at the ways they would interact with
each other, there were many different ways in which they could have handled the situation. Ong,
as the manager, has a lot to change about the way he leads. He should have called a meeting to
get the members on the same page, listened to the concerns of the team members, delegated tasks
more evenly, and controlled his emotions more effectively. The main thing he really needs to fix
is his attitude and demeanor; no one wants to work for a boss like that. If he had done this,
things would have been much different. Chris, on the other hand, should have communicated his
issues to the group and to Ong. He believed that he was getting all the work and instead of going
to get help from Yvonne, he just wasted the entire day just sitting around pouting about how he
had all the work. He should have also approached Ong about the way he was being talked to.
He was being disrespected left and right by Ong and didn’t even say anything until he was ready
to quit; they could have definitely talked it out. From this video, I learned the importance of
communicating and how perceptions can really change how you view a situation. They all had
different perceptions of what was going on and it caused them to act the way they did. It is very
important to communicate with your team and if you are having a conflict with a manager or
team member, it is best to address it in a civil manner before it gets to the point where someone
might “blow up” like Chris did when he quit.

In the past week, the class activity was on effective business writing. We had read an
email, critiqued it, and then revised the email. From the email, we came up with these
guidelines: double check grammar, keep a professional tone, refrain from using slang, be
concise, and to avoid giving useless information. From reading these emails, I learned the
importance of keeping a professional tone in your emails and having good grammar. If I had
received any of the emails from these examples as a recruiter, I would be very hesitant about
even scheduling an interview with them. It definitely would give off the wrong impression to a
recruiter which is why I have learned the importance of double checking your emails always. It
also helps to get a second pair of eyes on any email before you send it out.

Boss Conflict

There is no telling what I would do if my boss called me an idiot in front of my entire

team. It definitely depends on the context of how it happened. Were we going back and forth
before he said it? Did he say that insult subtly when explaining something to me like “Don’t be
an idiot, this is how you do it”? Whatever the situation, I just hope that I would first be able to
control my emotions. I am not the biggest fan of authority and I don’t know how I would take
my boss calling me an idiot; it definitely does depend on the context. After the situation is over,
whatever it is, I would ask to meet with the boss privately and discuss the incident. From
Chapter 10 of crucial conversations, I would use some techniques from the insubordination tactic
that was discussed. Even though this is not not directly correlated, the solution for
insubordination was to “speak up immediately, but respectfully.” I would definitely want to
speak to my boss as soon as possible and not just let it slide. If I don’t speak up right away, this
could lead to him continuing to call me insults and thinking that he can just call me or the team
whatever he wants without any repercussions. If it were the 2nd situation I mentioned where he
just calls me that in his explanation, I would say something along the lines of: “Hey Boss. I just
wanted to talk with you because you called me an idiot earlier when you were explaining
something to me. I feel as though you did not have to use that terminology with me as it is
disrespectful to me and my intelligence. I also do not think this is the best example to be setting
for our team on how we will treat each other. Things like this can only lead to more problems
occuring. Is it possible if we can refrain from using language like this to each other? I don’t
want any more issues to occur.” With this approach, I am upfront but I am also respectful. I am
approaching him to solve the issue; not to cause more.

Big Five Personality Assessment

D. Complete the free online Big Five Personality Assessment

The results from my Big Five Personality assessment are pretty accurate. I had the
highest percentage in Openness at 87.5% and the next highest percentages were Extraversion and
Agreeableness both at 56%. Openness being that high makes sense to me as I like to explore and
be creative. I have a passion for photography/videography and I am always looking for ways to
make something that is really cool and different. My mind tends to search for ways to express
my creations in a way that is very creative and different from the norm. They do mention that
people who are high in openness tend to enjoy the arts and seek out unusual complex forms of
self-expression. Agreeableness makes sense to me being so high because I do tend to put other
people's needs ahead of my own if they are my friend/family. I will go out of my way for my
friends or family if it means that they will be better off. I was surprised when my Neuroticism
was almost as high as the other traits. Neuroticism describes a person’s tendency to experience
negative emotions, anxiety, and a number of other things. When I think about it, the reason this
may be so high on this test is because of what I am going through right now. There are a lot of
times where I can doubt myself and compare myself to others too much which can lead to me
experiencing negative emotions. I usually don’t let it get to me but there are times where it does
but I accept it. Negative emotions are a part of human nature which is why I never really let it
get to me. I am usually always in a pretty good mental standing but there are times it gets to me;
but I accept that it’s normal for that. When I compare this with my DISC results, my DISC
results stated that I am socially oriented and that I like to get to know people in all walks of life.
This is pretty accurate with my Big Five results because Extraversion was one of my higher
results. When I compare these results with the Jung assessment, my Jung assessment stated that
I was an “Extravert-iNtuitive-Feeler-Perceiver.” This meant that I am charming, effervescent,
and people-oriented. When looking at my Big Five results, the results were also very similar.

It is very interesting seeing how accurate these tests have been. All three tests were
pretty accurate in describing me. I think the benefits of taking these tests is that it can give you
some insight into who you are. It can give you a better understanding of your personality and
show you why you may react a certain way in a situation. Self-awareness of your personality
type can yield very fruitful results. If I know that I may not be the most patient person, I may try
to pay attention to how I respond to people so that I do not respond in a way that will offend
them. Being self-aware of your personality type will help because a lot of people are not aware
of how they may interact with others just because that is just how they are. This is why these
results can be very useful in certain situations. However, I do think the results of these tests can
vary greatly depending on the mental state you are in and everything else that is going on in your
life at the time you take it. I could have drastically different results if I had taken this in a
different point in my life. Regardless, I think that these tests are a good indicator of how you
think of yourself at a given moment. More than anything, it should only be an indicator of what
someone might be like; it should not be used to fully describe a person.

Conclusion

In this paper, we wrote an email to my team addressing their lackluster performance and
the need for improvement, discussed an important concept that I learned in class this past week,
discussed how I would respond to a boss that calls me an “idiot”, and then discussed my Big
Five Personality Assessment results in relation to my Jung personality profile and DISC
assessment results.
Big Five Personality Assessment Graphs