Developing and Applying
Our Organizational Behavior Skills

Jane Doe
October 14, 2012

As I prepare to share with you some of the reasons why I have learned developing and applying Organization Behavior skills is so important, I feel the need to share with you my career background and examples of my personal experiences as they relate to organizational behavior. I have worked for Liberty Mutual for the past 22 years. I started with the company in an entry level position just out of high school doing data entry of policyholder information. I then went on to do some work in our Accounting organization and soon realized without a Bachelors
Degree, I would be in a similar position and pay scale for many years to come. I started taking night courses at Southern New Hampshire University for Accounting and quickly realized
Accounting was not for me. I then changed my major to Computer Information Systems (CIS) and began to pursue a career in our Information Technology organization at Liberty Mutual.
Seeing many of my friends moving to new and higher paying positions without me because they already had their degrees began to motivate me to kick it up a notch and really use my achievement motivation trait and focus all I had on my education. I started going to school four nights a week and added weekend courses to my schedule. I cannot tell you how many family events I missed because all I did was work, go to school, and do lots and lots of homework for the next few years. Upon obtaining my Bachelor of Science Degree in CIS, I started working as a developer on a large project known as “Year 2000” or “Y2K”. In this position, I began to understand importance of interpersonal skills and where I saw our company begin to become more diverse. With the size and impact of this project, we had to leverage the skills of both onshore and offshore development resources. We hired a significant number of contractors from India and leveraged our developers in Ireland to get us through this large initiative.
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Because of my interpersonal skills, interest in other cultures and overall ability to adapt to various personality types, it was easy for me to work with these resources on the project. A close friend of mine struggled with this on our team as she was just not open-minded and refused to work through the language barriers we faced. Since this effort, we have continued partnering with consultant firms where developers from India are a predominant part of those firms. Additionally, we hired on a number of these contractors as full time employees many of which are still with us today.
As part of supporting the execution of Liberty Mutual’s business strategies an organization known as IT Service Management (ITSM) was created. ITSM was built using the
Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). ITIL is a set of practices that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of business. ITIL describes procedures, tasks and checklists that are not organization-specific, used by an organization for establishing a minimum level of competency. It allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.
Anyway, I joined this organization as a Problem Manager leading teams to identify, understand and eliminate root cause of any outages associated with our software applications and hardware supporting our internal and external customers. It was in this organization I was first exposed to the Myers-Briggs type indicator (MBTI). When I initially took did the MBTI assessment I was an ESFJ. My results of the free Jung typology test we were asked to take as part of the course are accurate of my personality traits today. The results showed that I am a type ESFP. I am an extravert no question about it. I love people, excitement, telling stories and simply having a good time. I like to entertain at home and at work where possible. I enjoy
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