Author: papagena163

Posted on

Light from Many Lamps~ From William Ernest Henley

When I read the story of William Ernest Henley, I feel awe with his strong soul.   How could he keep having so positive and strong uplifting soul?
The poem Invictus also reminds me the first president of South Africa president, Nelson Mandela. This poem was his most favorite poem that it became the name of the movie about the story of President Mandela and South African rugby team. Nelson Mandela was a person of will. He spent 27 years in a prison separating from his family, he kept working on finishing  apartheid which he believed it was right. What he felt in the prison might be exactly the same as  Earnest poem ” Black  as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.”(Henley cited by Watson, 1951,p. 86) After he became the president, he still kept fighting for his belief, racism using national rugby team.

I respect him very much as one of the greatest leader in history.  This story tells me the importance to have a strong belief and believe myself positively. Once you believe something, try anyway to move forward. Sometimes nobody may understand you. Don’t give up. When I reflect my thirties, there were so many private issues happened and I was always pushed around. I became depressed  and more indecisive. I was influenced by the outer of world and let them to knock me down. Not many people can be like Henley or Mandela, I appreciate that I an opportunity to know them and have a lesson of “being  the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” (Nelson Mandela)

   

Posted on

Rank Talk Write~Toward Professional Wisdom

1-The 15 papers in this collection address not only the definition of wisdom but also the nature of wise practice.
2-While the primary focus of the content of the chapters is on the disciplines of education, social work and people professions. Much of what is written is applicable more widely to all professional contexts.
3-The inclusion of practitioners strengthens this cross-disciplinary application and relevance.
4-The book is about practical wisdom and professional deliberations.
5-The description of the practical wisdom “essential for effective engagement in human affairs” and it is cited by many in support of the position that emotion is an essential element of wisdom.
6-The useful discussion of this in the book includes both the means or techniques that can be used in developing professional competency as well as how the success or failure of this type of an approach to education is to be evaluated.
7-The final section includes chapters by practitioners, providing a consistent message about the importance of reflection in professional development.
8-Wisdom, as recognized in professional judgement, lies not in technical rationality but is an attribute of a mature moral agent.
Summary
Towards Professional Wisdom: Practical Deliberation in the Professions is a book about practical wisdom and professional deliberations written by Bondi, L. et al. ,which he included the 15 papers of collection.  In this book, he defined wisdom and the importance of basic learning.  The disciplines of education, social work, and ministry are stated in the early chapters and most of the chapters were about that if people learn the basic it can be applicable to all professional contexts. The author cited Aristotle Phronesis which has been cited by many people to add “the practical wisdom is essential for effective engagement in human affairs”  and emotion is important for practical wise, too. This book is useful because this book contains not only means or techniques which we can use for professions but also how to apply it.
 
References

Bondi, L., Carr, D, Clark, C and C. Clegg (2016). Towards Professional Wisdom: Practical Deliberation in the Professions. New York: Routledge.

Posted on

Light from Many Lamps – Unit 2

It is interesting to read the book “Light from many Lamps” and appreciate that I am given this opportunities to look back  my life reading through each lessons taught by great people. Every essays gave me essences of life welfare and inspire me, but I am attracted by the lesson of Dr. Frederic Loomis the most.

Dr. Loomis’s story goes like this. One day Dr. Loomis received one letter from China written by the lady who he met before but he didn’t remember, which effected to change the rest of his life. In the letter, the lady appreciated the empathy Dr. loomis gave her before in the middle of her desperate time so much that she would do something in turn to give the words ” Enjoy yourself. It is later than you think.”

This story is very meaningful for me in many ways of leadership.
First, Dr. Loomis visited the lady who was desperate for lost her child and empathized her even though he was very busy and she was not his patient.
Second, he is openness to listen to the advice from the person even he didn’t remember.
Thirdly, this is the most impressive part for me is that Dr.put the idea into practice instantly.
Finally, he affected your friend, acquaintance who met during his trip and he wrote book and influenced the public.

To my reflection, I have been struggling to be a man of practice and output my ideas to influence somebody. The people appeared in this story are decisive to get the things to be true. SO did the lady who wrote the letter to the doctor.
When we would like to influence someone as a leader, not as manager. It is important to show the direction decisively.
I would improve my decisiveness and determination from today because “it is later than you think”.

Reference
Watson, L.E. (1951). Light from Many Lamps. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Posted on

Evaluate my trait and style of leadership

I enjoyed to have questionnaires to assess my trait and style of leadership.
The results I obtain are not surprising very much, but it is interesting to break the each traits which we need for leadership into numerous data and view myself characters objectively.  To my surprise, the evaluation from others and myself still has the almost same trend.

 

According to Northhouse ( Northouse, P. G. ,2019) is some of the most important traits for a leader is intelligence, self-confidence, determination, integrity, and sociability.  I have believed self-confidence and determination which are the weakest for me are more important among these traits, which I believe my most weakest points as a leader. In fact, the questionnaires, it revealed that my two weakest points are self-confidence and determination. And different from the samples, my overall of self-rating is much lower than any other people’s rating.

However at the same time, the questionnaires show consistently my strength is building relationship with people. I noticed I am very sensitive my and other people’s emotion. I think it relates with my personal trait that I am not a confident person which I thought my weakness. I feel interesting that my weakest traits as a leadership strengthen my emotional intelligence at the same time, which is stated to be the most effective traits in leadership. I have been struggling to build my self-confidence but now I think because I am not confident, I am good at responding and supporting other people, and in my reflection, I was good at team management with my high supportive leadership style.

Through these questionnaires, it revealed I am imbalance as a leader in terms of skills approach and behavioral approach. I would improve my self-confidence and determination to gain more conceptual skill,task-oriented behavior for being a better leader.

References
Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

 

Posted on

Introduction

Hello, everyone!

I feel great and a little nervous to be connected in this way because this is my first experience of learning online, making my own site and writing my opinion on my blog. Especially everything in English!!
Even now I can’t believe I am going to study in Canada.

My name is Hiromi.
In fact, I have some other name, Hiromi, Abby, A-bin, Rubin. I don’t mind that you call me whichever you want.

My Roots

I am from Japan, but I am originally from Taiwan.
My father who was a surgeon decided to go to Japan to take his thesis when I was 10 months. So, in my first memory of my childhood, I was already in Japan and I wonder why people always looked at me curiously and I had a different strange name from other people. Even though I have the same appearance as Japanese and speak fluent Japanese, people always treated me differently because there were few foreigners living in Japan at that time. It was embarrassing experience for young Rubin (my original Taiwanese name) to be treated as a Taiwanese because our family was so poor student family that we couldn’t go back to Taiwan for a long time until I grew older and I didn’t know about Taiwan at all. My parents who wanted to learn Japanese from me forced me to speak Japanese which I learned from TV and didn’t teach me Mandarin and Taiwanese. Because of that, afterwards when I visited Taiwan which I believed my home country, people and even my relatives treated me as a Japanese. The life was so tough and severe with lots of prejudice. Many parents didn’t allow me to play with their children. I often was yelled ” go back to your country!”  When I was bullied, I couldn’t shared my feeling with my parents because of language barrier.
I always seek my identity

“who am I? what I am?”

When I was 10 years old, one day my parents told me that we got Japanese citizenship and I became “Hiromi” from today!  It was so shocked that I had to change my original name. I thought I was Rubin, A-bin (my Taiwanese nickname), or Abby (my English name from Taiwanese name) and I had been told I was different from everybody because I was not Japanese and now I became Japanese?? To my surprise, once I changed my name to Hiromi, the life turned to be very easy and smoothly to live.
I went to med school. became a plastic surgeon, met my husband and have 3 wonderful children.
4 years ago, I take sabbatical leave from my work and moved to Canada.
I would like to enhance my children’s education but also I would like them learn more about different cultures outside Japan and also for myself. Japan is surrounding by the ocean and even now I feel Japanese society is closed for both foreign people and Japanese people.

For a long time,  I feel I don’t belong to anywhere and seek my root.
I feel comfortable to breath in Canada because nobody cares whichever I am Taiwanese or Japanese!  At the beginning, I hesitated to say I am Japanese even I got Japanese passport for more than 30 years but gradually I feel more comfortable to think to be Japanese because I noticed my behavior　(I am polite, have habit of bow often and good at using Emoji(^^♪), the way of thinking is mostly based on Japanese culture. Even I look like more Japanese compared to my cousin living in Taiwan. When I lived in Japan which is very homogenous country, I care what I am different from that monotone even it is subtle. The experience and exposure to the different other culture and people coming from the world opened my eye. Now I am happy that have dual cultural background. I noticed I can see the things objectively and uniquely .

My Career

I had worked as a plastic surgeon for 15 years when I lived in Japan.
Throughout my career, while my main role was that of a clinician, I was also promoted to become more directly involved with the hospital management teams and with various personnel affairs.
This role has reinforced my interest in studying how best to become a good team leader. The number of physicians and general medical staff members are chronically insufficient in many parts of Japan. Therefore, great leadership and management skills are essential to organize and maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of these limited teams to work to their greatest potential. At the same time, I was tired to balance my life as a full-time plastic surgeon and being mom for my three children without any help. Japanese working hour is so long that I could spend only two hours a day with my children. I knew it was hard for me to stop working in Japan because there are not enough plastic surgeons.
It was my choice to move to Canada to focus on the care and upbringing our three children for a while. I didn’t do anything but taking care of my children for three years.
As our children have settled well into their school-life here in Canada, I have found myself with more free time. Therefore, I began to think that I would make better use of my free time to enhance my medical career by going back to the higher education school system.

My Hobby

Now you know I have some different name, but why my blog name is Papagena?
I like travel and music. Especially my passion is on classical music.
Papagena is one of characters in Mozart’s popular opera Magic Flute.(Right picture from Los Angels Opera) I originally played the piano but shifted to play the violin and join the orchestra. Nowadays I restarted to play the piano for my daughter who plays the violin.
I love to live here in Canada but I am sorry to miss some cultural atmosphere.
One of my dream is living in Europe after my retirement someday.

Here is my introduction. I am excited to get to know you and look forward to walking along  the journey of 501.

Posted on

Reply to Daneen: Follow the leadership

I am interested in reading about your favorite leader whom you are following Twitter.
Like you, I  have used social media only with my family and friend and haven’t used it to follow leaders or celebrities to expand my opinion very much until I got this assignment.

After  I read blog I am so impressed how we can be inspired any leader anywhere in the world instantly. You started to follow her by Twitter after you heard about her from your colleague even though you didn’t know her.  And now you know her so well that write to introduce  her in your blog.

I  think I would like to going to use SMS as a source of alive information.

Thank you for your sharing.

Hiromi

 

 

Posted on

Follow the leadership

I followed Mr. Tsutomu Uematsu’s　facebook.　(https://www.facebook.com/tsutomu.uematsuhc_ref=ARTEMdfB5ZuHcbsPwJTPbf2P4q5jYSvgKzTiFUwpp9Ue9ydWo_nQjPUnfX6K0m50Lhc).

Tsutomu Uematsu is President of a small company called Uematsu Electoric Co., Ltd. located in country side of Northern part of Japan. His outstanding idea is everybody is fair to be born to change the world. He said if we kept dreaming, the dream will come true. He has practiced it by himself. His dream from his childhood is developing rockets for space. However, he was not an elite and it seemed to be impossible to start space development with his small company which has 20 employees manufacturing the special magnet for recycling stuffs. Finally he accomplished to launched his original miniaturized rocket.

His remarkable part as a leader is showing the long-term vision and strong will to fulfill it. He treated everybody fair and ask everybody to take a part of his team. When I worked as a physician, sometimes I just stayed to be a practitioner rather than try to keep moving on, improving to create new treatment. In medical field, we have a lot of restriction of way of treatment, human resources. Those restriction is for health insurance setting by the government. In Japan, a doctor normally become an emergent leader in medical team but my plastic surgery department is small that has only two doctors. His concept remind me to be humble to ask for help from followers and don’t give up to move forward.

According to his activity, he is a servant leader. His company is small and his servant leadership create value for company as a community.  I think he is already good at using social media to broad your concept. His facebook page is full of his encourage. He always wear his company’s uniform to appeal his character.

I believe the strong good leadership arise from the attitude that leader shows followers belief of their mission and long-term vision. His passionate attitude always reminds me not to forget passion.

Posted on

Reply to Sarah: Learning Activity 4: Blog Post 2

Sarah wrote

https://create.twu.ca/sjasmins/2018/09/29/learning-activity-4-blog-post-2/

Hi Sarah,

I am interested in reading your story as an emergent leader. You also wrote “trust” is very important for leadership and I imagined you have practiced and now be trusted by your colleague.

For your question “Do you think it’s rare for someone in an assigned leadership role to take both a management and leadership approach? Which approach do you think more assigned leaders tend to practice?”

I think it doesn’t matter whichever the leadership is assigned or emergent, it is more depends on the level of leadership position and type of business where an assigned leadership is taken. If a group or an organization is small, I think an assigned leader more often take both approach. Think of small business owner with a few employee. As Northouse worte,  leader and manager can take both, managers think more about people rather than  leader think more about change or vision of the group.  For small group, leader who has the most information and experience  also practice the role of manager. An emergent leader is promoted to be an assigned leaders.

Hopefully I would like know what you think about it.

Best regards,

Hiromi

 

 

 

Posted on

Servant Leader: Blog 3

Among seven servant leader behaviors emerged from Liden et al.’s (2008), I would choose conceptualizing, helping followers grow and succeed and　Empowerment.

With conceptualizing, servant leader should understand the organization with a big picture. Leader also needs to concern with the mission of the organization and the long term-vision. Besides that, A servant leader need to grasp how the situation is going on. Servant leader.  When leader empathized and concern followers first, there may be a risk that the leader  is stucked with the followers feeling or requests and loose the long vision. Helping followers grow and succeed may be not always satisfy the followers’ request. Leader with long view can lead the followers in proper direction. Empower is another behavior which servant leader provide. Empowering is to give some power for followers to let them control the situations by themselves. These behaviors remind me Adler psychology. In Adler psychology, we trust people that they can improve naturally and use encouragement to support their grow or improvement.

 

Among these three behavior, empower is the most challenging for me. Often in the cases, doing something by myselves is much easier and faster than waiting for somebody is growing to do that. But for prosper of the organization, empower is very important. When each employee becomes aware of their situations and motivated to manage by themselves. Employee can behave more independently.

 

I feel servant leadership takes longer time to penetrate to the organization because leader urge and wait for followers’ improvement. Also leader should know both small precise information about followers but also big picture of long-term goal.

What kinds of business are good to have servant leader?

References

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Liden, R.C., Wayne, S.J., Zhao, H.,& Henderson, D. (2008) Servant leadership : Development of a multidimensional measured and multi-level assessment. The Leadership Quarterly, 19,161-177.

Posted on

Assigned leader vs Emergent leader :Blog 2

Northouse defined that leader has two category including assigned leaders and emergent leaders. (Northouse, 2019) An assigned leader is defined as a leader engaging with certain leading position such as CEO, principal, manage, or team head and everyone can recognize the leader by positions. Whereas Emergent leader is a real leader who really influences members of a group to move onto the goal regardless of having a certain position or not.
When I attended some class in the previous university, the professor suddenly divided the class into the small group of 4~5 people to let us try Marshmallow challenge, which compete to build the highest Marshmallow tower using some pasta and tape in 18 minutes. There were 4 members in my group and the other group members including two men and a woman were all from India. First, I thought they were better English speaker and one of the men said he was confident about the activity, so I would become followers. However, some time passed, two men started to argue to push their own way respectively. The other lady didn’t say anything and watched them. I tried to listen both opinions and it seemed that I had more geometric knowledge to design a tower. I tried to communicate nicely to point out their contradiction. I noticed both men were short temper and were not good at listening the other opinion. I emerged as a leader and leaded our discussion and activity and finally our team won the challenge with the highest record.

Northouse(2019) mentioned, “There are clear differences between management and leadership, the two constructs overlap.” Simonet and Tett (2012) who researched the overlap the difference between leadership and management found both leadership and management involve productivity, customer focus, professionalism, and goal setting, but they found leadership has some other peculiar aspects such as motivating intrinsically, creative thinking, strategic planning, tolerance of ambiguity, and being able to read people, whereas management involves rule orientation, short-term planning, motivating extrinsically, orderliness, safety concerns, and timeliness. I think leadership is more focus on followers as human beings who can improve and change by influence of leader. Manager is more focus how to use human resources to achieve the goal. For the prosper of the organization, I think strategic long-term planning is important.

I wonder what kind of situations do we need a manager? and what kind of situations do we need a leader? Leader can take over manager?

References

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Simonet, D.V., & Tett, R.P. (2012). Five perspectives on the leadership-management relationship: competency-based evaluation and integration. Journal of Leadership & Organization Studies, 20(2), 199-213