1 page 5 minute Pitch Business

Applying what you learn to your personal and professional experience is perhaps the best way to retain new information. One way to do this is to add to a regular, ongoing reflection that asks you to apply this new material. Throughout this course, you will be asked to reflect on the week’s material and respond to a prompt in a Professional Reflection. Read through the Porter article, listed in the Learning Resources, for more information on self-reflection. You will submit these reflections each week within the same document. In other words, you will continue to build your Professional Reflection as part of one Word document, inserting new headings for each new weekly prompt. Each heading should specify the week and the name of the assignment.

Note:  In addition to responding to the Reflection prompts each week, you are expected to provide any surprises you learned in the week’s Learning Resources, Discussions, and/or Assignments.

In this first Professional Reflection, you will create a 5-Minute Pitch. Imagine that you are hoping to move into a management position that has become available in your organization. You see the hiring manager, but she has only five minutes available to talk. How do you determine what is important to share in this short amount of time and what you can leave out?

Consider how you would like to present your case to the hiring manager, especially why you would be the best candidate for the management position. You know the hiring manager is very interested in learning about your management philosophy and will likely ask you to summarize the most important skills that you believe managers must have. In addition, you should be prepared to explain the reasons why you think that managers succeed and fail.

To prepare for your Professional Reflection:

· Consider what you believe are the most important characteristics managers possess and why.

· Reflect on the extent to which you have these characteristics.

· Reflect on your management strengths that you discovered as a result of your self-assessment in this week’s Discussion 2.

· Review this week’s Learning Resources, especially:

· Achievement Unlimited [Achievement Unlimited]. (2010, August 18). Management skills – Why managers fail [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5u0RqEjgYw

· Horstman, M. (2016). The effective manager. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

· Chapter 1, “What is an Effective Manager?”

· Chapter 2, “The Four Critical Behaviors”

· Wiseman, L. (2015, October 2). New managers: Embrace your rookie status. Harvard Business Review.

· Document: Professional Reflection Assignment Instructions (PDF)

To complete the Professional Reflection Assignment, compose a document that addresses the following (Note: There are two sections to this Professional Reflection – your 5-Minute Pitch and your synthesis of what you consider to be the most important things that you learned this week):

Based on what you have read and discussed this week, what would be the most important elements that you could share with a hiring manager in the limited 5 minutes she has available to talk? With this in mind, develop a script for your 5-Minute Pitch as your first professional reflection that cohesively addresses the following:

· After synthesizing the Discussion Board posts with this week’s resources, identify the three most important attributes—skills, behaviors, and characteristics—of effective managers and why you have selected these attributes, based on what you believe managers do.

· Evaluate the extent to which you think you have the characteristics that managers possess, along with examples that illustrate these characteristics. (Remember, you are developing a script to make a case about why you would be effective in a new management role.)

· Explain how you anticipate this knowledge will help you be an effective manager.

· Delineate some specific reasons as to why you believe that some individuals are more successful as managers and others are not. Explain your reasoning. To what extent do the characteristics that you outlined contribute to success or failure?

· What strategies will you use to continue to develop your skills and knowledge of your own strengths as they relate to your management success. What will you do (and not do) to ensure that you are an effective manager?

Following your 5-Minute Pitch, respond to the following, in which you:

· Explain whether your opinion about management characteristics has changed as you examine this week’s Discussion posts from your colleagues. Describe the ways in which your thinking changed. If you did not change your thinking, what aspects of the Discussion further informed your position? How do you think that seeking input from others can impact your thinking?

· Summarize the three most important things that you learned this week—from the Learning Resources and Discussions—about management characteristics or your own strengths and weaknesses, including why you selected them and how you will apply them to your role as a manager. This may include anything that surprised you.

Be sure to support your Professional Reflection using this week’s readings or other credible and relevant resources. You may also include quotes from the weekly Discussion that you think support your 5-Minute Pitch.

General Guidance: This week’s Professional Reflection submission should be about 1 page in length (remember the goal is to have a 5-minute speech, so you need to be succinct).