Consultant Skills – ORJI Cycle
In class tonight, our discussion was around the ORJI cycle.
O-Observation
R-Reaction
J-Judgment
I-Intervene
Recently, I encounter a situation that involved the ORJI cycle with my counterpart at work. In my opinion, my counterpart was of equal status even though; her title is “Senior Training Specialist.
In a conversation with my counterpart, I was informed by her (Observation) that all of my vacations must go though her as she was not my supervisor. Of course, this news came to a surprise for me, as this new position was never posted nor was it communicated to me from my management that she had been given such an opportunity. At that point in time, I received the information and processed it as professional as I knew how and began to formulate how such a huge transition be possible in a well established organization.
After returning to my desk, I started quickly on my research (Reaction) to see if, in fact, this was all true. I first made a telephone call to my Human Resource Representative to see if there were any recent promotions within my department. The outcome of that telephone call validated that there were no recent promotions. My HR representative went onto encourage me to approach my manager to get clarification on the conversation I had with my counterpart. (Judgment)
The next day I went into my manager’s office (Intervene) with my list of questions in hand along with a nice little notepad to take notes of the conversation. My manager first appeared to be a little concern because of my disappointed face expression. I felt let down by the manager I most admired. How could he possibly let this chain of events happen in this way? I have read enough books to know that good management skills were lacking from these chain of events. I knew that any changes in my reporting structure should have been communicated by him and not from my counterpart. My manager began to apologize for the confusion around my observation of the news my counterpart shared with me. He assured me that she was in no way my new supervisor and that her role was to only “coordinator” vacation time. She was not given the authority to approve or disapprove of anyone’s time away from work. The question here is…who screwed up the ORJI cycle first?
