Organizational Culture

I hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! Last week Carly, Sarah, and I did our final presentation for our Healthcare Management class. We decided to do it on Organizational Culture, and I thought it was extremely interesting. We started the class off by doing a few team building exercises. The first one was a 30 second dance party, which I personally really enjoyed, but I don't know about everyone else. The second one was the human knot exercise. For those who don't know what it is, it involves a group of people forming a circle and reaching out to hold the hands of two different group members. The next step is to try and untangle without letting go of the other people's hands. The purpose behind these activities were to show how working together and doing silly fun things can help to build relationships and therefore form a culture. We watched a few short videos on organizational culture, my favorite was the one that portrayed the culture of Zappos. I liked this video the best because it gave a real world example of an organization that had a very unique culture. For the rest of the presentation we decided to take a different approach than usual. Instead of just finding a universal definition and going off of that, I found an online thread from Linked-in that had many different executives describe what they believed organizational culture entailed. I found about twelve different quotes that I believed were of value to share with the class, and then went on to describe them. We asked which ones most people agreed with the most and everyone seemed to agree on the most part. We then had a pretty great class discussion that lasted a while. It involved fraternities and sororities and how they have their own organizational cultures, and we then related those to that of an organizational culture in a workplace. I am glad to be done with my presentations for the semester, but I do believe that they were important and a good experience to have had. It helped me working on my presentation skills, as well as my public speaking skills. I feel as though I am now much more comfortable talking in front of a crowd than I was before.