Organizational Behavior - Dr. Anna Lennard, Oklahoma State University

Okay, and you went to Michigan, what was the degree in? Yeah so at Michigan State, I got my degree in organizational behavior and business management. Okay and you what do you teacher here at Spears? Yeah so I teach the main core management class that the undergrads take, so management 3123. It's managing behavior in organizations. When it comes to that class, what are the top three things that you think students should take away from? Oooh, the top three things it should take away.. one would be applying the class concepts that we use to actually like real life organizations. So the final project we do has them approach a real business in Stillwater or just outside of Stillwater and helps them with a real management problem that the organization is having. The second thing I would say is that we do a lot of cases and so learning like how to see the business decisions that are being made out in the real world, and understand the thought decisions behind them, and kind of being able to critique them and use these critical thinking skills. And then lastly, I would say, we do a lot of stuff on leadership and so leadership development both of themselves as students, as well as kind of leadership theories that they might run into in the workplace kind of seeing a manager doing a particular set of things.

What do you think are the best leadership skills to have when going into an organization and managing behavior? Okay, yeah so the first is to understand when to use certain behaviors, right? So a lot of people have leadership styles that they think they should just be with everyone all the time. But we spend a lot of time in class talking about what we call contingency theories, so situations when you might want to be transformational or situations what you might want to be transactional, or how to be charismatic right in a way to get people on your side when you're trying to get something new to happen in your business environment. We also talk a lot about being true and authentic to yourself as a leader, and not trying to necessarily copy what you think you "have to be" right? There are a lot of different ways you can be an introverted leader, you can be an extroverted leader. You know your employees want to end up seeing you as a person more than this figurehead right and that's unique to everyone.

What are some your favorite topics to cover in class? I do a lot of work in negotiations. So I really love our negotiation part of the class. They get hands-on experience negotiating with each other. I give them a whole lecture on how to negotiate their first job offers and how to get more money or more benefits. That's really fun for me and I think that it's most helpful for students, because I get a lot of emails afterwards with students reaching out right? Maybe in their second job, trying to remember what those steps were so that I think ends up sticking with them in the long term. I also really like talking about like power and politics in organizations, that's a lot of fun. You know, ways that you know you can still wield power as someone coming in at a low level in an organization. How students who are quite young can still end up being really powerful people. So yeah! I think those are probably my favorite topics.