Tag Archives: Upper Management

Project #4 – The Fear of Giving Criticism

Managers have a responsibility to lead and motivate their staff effectively to reach their full potential. Being able to give and receive critical feedback without fear is crucial but managers resist giving negative feedback because they don’t want to hurt their employees feelings. Even harder for a manager is to criticize his or her own boss. This can be seen as a being insubordinate and have lasting effects. Yet, the only way to improve is to provide a clear picture of the situation and offer clear solutions to the problem.

This module is targeted towards managers and highlights important aspects of critical resolution. Even the best managers need to hear when things are not going correctly and need to be reviewed. The user will have a chance to engage in the module by first reading about the scenario of Roger, a middle-manager and choosing certain outcomes for a selection of choices.

Training Module for Managers


Reflection

This project was once again a challenge for me. Yet coding is something I am interested in and the ability to create compelling webpages is a very useful skill to have. also creating something quite new using methods I have never used before really allowed me to push myself. My goal for this project was to create something that others could actually use and that would be of a help.

First of all, it was very helpful having a starting point. Developing on the idea of criticism was the starting point and made the process a whole lot easier. I knew that I wanted to create a training module but I wanted it to be a little different. So I decided to make managers the focus of my module and therefore, my target audience. These are managers in a middle-management position so they have staff who they are responsible for and a boss who they answer to. I wanted to not do the usual boss criticizing their own staff but investigate what a boss could do to criticize his or her own boss. I felt that this is not an issue commonly dealt with when writing about criticism.  

Being introduced to Notepad ++ programming was interesting and I found that it was well suited the assignment and remarkably easy to use. Then came the challenge of using the Hypertext MarkUp Language (HTML) which I found to be very useful. First, I used the Dia Diagram to create a flowchart of my module. Secondly, I created a folder to store the code and began coding. I wanted to build a decent webpage that would really reflect my concepts of a module while learning the basics of coding.
I designed the module to start with an overview of the problem and followed by a scenario and several choices that the user can choose. Based on the choices, there are conditions to consider and outcomes for each choice. Although no answer is perfect, the third choice provides the best outcome.