As a refresher of the decision I shared in my first blog post, I made a decision based on the organizational values, past experience, and policies to help a pregnant co-worker seek medical attention. In a case such as this, I cannot say I would have changed my approach. The urgency of her personal health required an immediate decision, and would not have allowed me time to read articles about the best practices of handling similar situations. After taking this course, I was prompted to wonder whether there are any studies that examined how organizational leadership handles such personal crises in the workplace. A general search on the TWU Library site revealed 14 results, and clicking the limiter – Scholarly/Peer Reviewed Journals – further shortened this list to four results. For me, the lack of research is understandable as each personal crisis someone faces in different work areas impact the organization and staff in such a variety of ways that cannot be fully predicted. Despite this, I think a study that looked into how servant leadership based organizations and non-servant leadership based organizations handled situations such as this would be incredibly interesting and worth studying.
Although I would not have changed my approach in this scenario, this course has shaped my decision-making and critique approaches in my workplace. In the duration of this course, there was a situation with a new staff member who had difficultly reading the schedule correctly and coming in for his shifts at the appropriate time. Beyond further developing my understanding of the servant leadership approach through the articles read in this course and my supervisor’s coaching, I was inclined to seek truth about the matter from the staff member directly and search for resources or approaches to support this staff member. I connected with this particular staff member and surrounding staff that were impacted by the situation, and sought resources from our organization and online to suggest in hopes of helping this individual improve.