In an ethical community Denning identifies the three basic components that are necessary for an organization and they are trust, loyalty and solidarity. I am an employee at Embry-Riddle University Worldwide and I work in the Financial Aid Department. We are a team of only eight employees handling roughly 6,000 financial aid recipients yearly. Our Director is a very level headed, logical and organized individual that somehow keeps us running efficiently and happily. We call ourselves the “dream team” and live by the motto “one team one dream”. This idea or objective was imposed through the motivation our Director encourages within his department. He instills the three basic components upon our department every day.
Financial aid is a very private department in that we handle very sensitive documents with student’s personal information. This type of atmosphere requires us to be very trustworthy employees. About 30% of students are selected for a process called verification every academic year where they have to submit certain documentation to be verified before they can receive financial aid. The Department of Education requires us to review student’s federal tax transcripts, w2 statements, household clarification, divorce decrees, child support documentation and military paperwork. Students trust that when they are submitting these documents we are going to follow our process and procedures to complete their verification, which we do. Our Director stresses the importance of trust within our department and leads by example. When anyone in the department has an issue no matter what it might be about we know we can go to him and talk about it and he will keep the conversation private. Having a director that I can trust with anything and everything means more to me than making a higher salary because there is a sense of comfort and ease in our department that other department’s lack. I feel like because he is a trustworthy director we follow this same characteristic and remain trustworthy to our students and fellow coworkers.
Loyalty is an extremely important component in the Financial Aid Department as we are very close with each other. We are more like family then coworkers as we fight and bicker as a family will, but then the next 10 minutes we are already over it and moving on to the topic at hand. If someone hurts one of us the other 7 coworkers are standing at the hurt coworker’s side ready to defend and protect against whoever caused the pain. This type of loyalty is also demonstrated by our director. I have never been in a situation where I felt like he has turned his back on me. If one of us makes a mistake he will defend us and take the blame and suffer the repercussions before he will ever let one of us receive the brunt of the consequences because that is the type of leader he is. He is loyal and trusts us to perform our job to the best of our ability without micromanaging us. Since we are treated this way we also treat him the same. No one in our organization is unaware of how loyal we are to our director because we make it known that he is the best, even though it really embarrasses him! We go out of our way to inform him and his upper management just how special, caring and hard working he is any chance we get because he deserves it.
The last component necessary according to Denning is solidarity and this is also a part of the theme in the Financial Aid Department. I practice solidarity for students all the time because if I believe I can make a difference for their benefit, I will. Recently I had a student who can be quite a challenge at times because he does not always hear what I am trying to explain to him. Recently he maxed out on all of his undergraduate loans he can receive and he’s a junior. Maxing out on your undergraduate loans as a junior isn’t good because he still has another whole year of schooling before he can graduate and he was using financial aid to pay for all of his classes. The student enrolled in May classes to finish up his junior year unaware that he was going to be required to pay out of pocket and he didn’t call to check on his financial aid until week 6 of the class. This was a very difficult predicament because I couldn’t award him any more Federal Stafford Loans according to the Department of Education, but I wanted to find a way for him to attend school because after talking to him I found him to be a very passionate man in his 50’s trying pursue his dreams. The student informed me that he was disabled and ineligible to receive a private loan because he didn’t work and didn’t have anyone to cosign for him. With all of this information I went to my director knowing I we couldn’t do much, but I wanted to try anything I could even if it meant bending the rules somehow to give him more funding. This was against my personal beliefs however since it meant so much to my student to attend college I had to exhaust my efforts for him. In the end I was able to find him an additional $500.00 dollars in scholarships he qualified for that we applied towards his balance for his May classes. Before ending our conversation we went through the different scholarships he could apply for during his senior year together. I have never felt more satisfied with my job then that day knowing my student didn’t lose hope. I empowered him to fight through this challenge. I reminded him to never to let anything stop him and he was so grateful for that.
The three basic components Denning discusses that are necessary in an ethical community are trust, loyalty and solidarity and these components are all found within my department. I don’t believe we are lacking in any areas except maybe we need more help to handle our tremendous responsibility in serving around 6,000 financial aid students. We are a pretty fortunate bunch of employees to be lucky enough to have a director that can lead by example. We all look to him for guidance in developing into successful leaders ourselves one day.
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