Business & Organizational Communication Portfolio

  Gender at work is something that has been discussed more recently throughout the year due to women wanting equal pay and no longer being the primary caretaker in their homes anymore. Women are constantly being discriminated and treated unequally at work. This comes in the form of pay differences among genders or women being overlooked for a position because they are seen as the primary caregiver in their family, no matter how much experience or hard work they do at their job. This free creation shows a man supporting his female coworker get equal rights in their company which many men should do. Although this stigma has been changing in the past few years, it still occurs and needs to be changed.  

  For this free creation, I wanted to show that you shouldn’t hit the yes button on a meeting invite without having most if not all the information about the meeting beforehand. The speaker in the TedTalk video explains that by accepting the invitation, we are being polite to the point where we say yes and move on. This action has now become known as the term MAS or Mindless Acceptance Syndrome. MAS has created a new fundamental belief where people believe that they are “powerless to do anything other than go to meetings and suffer through these poorly run meetings to live another day” when, we are not. So don’t live in MAS, hit the maybe/interested button and get the information you need about the meeting before accepting or going to it.  

This is an image of one of the characters from the show Pretty Little Liars telling someone to be quiet with the don’t sign over it that says, “Don’t be silent”. I chose to do this as when we choose to be silent, we are allowing something, usually negative, to happen. When someone chooses to be silent, they are not only hurting themselves, but also the company they work for. HBR: 10 Must-Reads on Communication says explains that “Silencing (yourself) doesn’t resolve anything; rather than erase difference, pushes them beneath the surface.” (pg. 97) So by creating this “sign” you are doing the right thing by speaking up/out about the issue(s) at hand.    

This creation was created in the Linguistic style of communication. This communication style depends on a person's personal speaking style, whether that means that they are direct, indirect, the word choice they use, questions, and many other characteristics to how one speaks to someone else. The linguistic style often takes the form of a conversation. I have chosen this image to create my visual creation because it is two former coaches from the Dallas Cowboys having a conversation about what play they should run next. So, I turned it into a meme with the linguistic style by adding words that usually signal a conversation between two people and that would also prompt a conversation rather than a yes or no answer.  

This visual creation encompasses my understanding of the controller leader from Chapter 2. A controller wants to know everything and have all the information, so they can build off what they must persuade others. This visual creation is from a scene in  It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia  where this character is looking for a specific person to give mail to but could not find them. So, he goes down a rabbit hole to find all the information he can about the person to find them, just like a controller is trying to find out if they have all the information that they can use.