No one wants a boss like Michael Scott, a central character in NBC’s “The Office.” But becoming Michael Scott might be worse.
Dr. Patricia Lanier is helping University of Louisiana at Lafayette students avoid such comparisons through her principles of management course.
The course is required for business majors, as well as several other disciplines, and is offered online as well as on-campus.
“It’s all about learning the basics of being a manager,” the professor explains. “Regardless of what your chosen profession is going to be, whether it’s communications or dietetics or even engineering, we hope that at some point in time all our students will eventually make it into a leadership position, either as a supervisor or manager.”
Management of Behavior and Organizations (MGMT 320) prepares students in the BSBA in Management online degree program with the core skills to lead and manage by presenting fundamentals of hiring, pay, recruitment, and more.
Dr. Lanier began teaching online in 2001. Since then she’s developed a number of methods to connect with students from afar.
“Initially, my concerns were my ability to interact and engage with students because that’s something I enjoy in the classroom,” she says.
“What I’ve had to do over time is adapt and come up with creative ways that I can still have that interaction, and students can interact with each other so the experience is not significantly different from students in the classroom.”
A key component of creating that experience is to bring students out of the textbook.
Dr. Lanier says she’ll ask students to analyze current events or even movies or television shows like “The Office,” “Kitchen Nightmares,” or old episodes of “Star Trek” to identify management principles and leadership styles.
“Textbook material is presented in a very sanitized way,” she says. “So it’s usually pretty easy for a student to do an assignment straight out of a textbook.
“But when I’m asking them to watch a movie or assess a case of some kind, then they’ve got to learn how to apply that knowledge and recognize different qualities, characteristics or theories or whatever it is they’ve learned.”
Students have to not only describe a leadership style exhibited by a certain character, for instance, but also defend their assessment. Online, this is done through forum posts where students publish and discuss their observations with other students.
Becoming versed in professional collaboration through technology further prepares students to enter the workforce, Dr. Lanier says.
“Managers today have to use so many types of technology,” she says. “I think it helps from a very practical standpoint to make them familiar with Zoom (web conferencing) or forum posts or different video mechanisms.”
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