Identity, Values and Strengths Exploration

Core personal values

Explain a situation where you have had an ethical decision to make.

A while ago I had a job where I was the only female and immigrant in the place. Since the beginning I noticed a very strong personality in my manager, and a few actions that I didn't agree with. He just said plenty of commentaries denigrating other cultures (nothing related to me) and a few political comments that weren't appropriate to make.

One day I decided to have a meeting with him to let him know how uncomfortable his comments were making me feel. I was feeling very down and vulnerable so I was in need to express my feelings. His reaction was shocking, he got very aggressive, and kept saying that none of his commentaries were racist and told me that if I didn’t like how he is I should resign. I didn’t resign but I asked for the day off as I was having a very bad time. When I arrived home with all my sadness I did some research on how to approach the situation, I found out about the New Zealand Human Right Commission so I decided to give them a call, they were very helpful. They sent me some documentation to teach me how to manage the situation and also to educate him.

The next day I had another meeting with him and gave him an educational documentation about what we were dealing with. He got aggressive again and told me that he wasn’t interested in reading anything, but he took the papers and left the room. After that I started to be a ghost on the team, my manager stopped giving me the same amount of clients that I used to have and even my workmate noticed the changes. Every meeting after that started to be very aggressive and very unrespectful with his commentaries so I decided to record audio of one of our meetings. A month after that I decided to give my resignation letter as my soul was dying in that environment.

After my resignation letter the owner of the company realized that something wasn’t right, so he decided to take a flight to meet me and have a conversation with me (we were based in another city). In our meeting I told him what I was experiencing and how I was feeling about it. He keeps saying that it must be a must understanding and that he doesn't believe that he said that thing to me, until I show him the record. After that he apologized on behalf of the company and tried to convince me to don’t leave. I told him that I was keen to be back after the bad situations in the company changed.

After a few months I found out that the manager resigned from the company and they had a new woman and immigrate manager. They contacted me and gave me the chance to be back in business.

The ethical problem I faced here was whether it was legal or ethical for me to record a workmate surreptitiously, despite his actions. Though it may not have been legal, I do think that he acted inappropriately and needed to be caught out. In the end, the situation was dealt with appropriately by the company and the recording helped with that.

Describe how your culture has influenced your values and identity.

Seeing so much unhappiness in my home country’s culture opened me to the need to help others. Since I was a child I always tried to walk with a smile on my face, and it is amazing how just a simple smile can change another person's mood. That is something that I love.

Evaluate your strengths and limitations in terms of your learning and career development

I guess my strengths are that I’m hungry to learn, I learn to believe in myself and I know how far I can get with my dedication and constant work.

My limitation is my dyslexia and have english as a second language, I struggle to express myself and put my ideas into a paper and my very bad grammar (thanks so much to Grammarly app for making my life easier)

Share an example from your experience of where you were trying to work productively with others, but there was resistance or tension. Discuss the strategies you used at that time, how effective they were, and your reflections on what other strategies you would try now, and why.

Before I graduated from UX and Web design I put together a team to create a portfolio website for the graduating folks, we had just two week to give the final product and we were 5 people working on the page. We did stand up meetings everyday except for one person who always arrives late and changes the design just because he couldn’t figure out how to do it. For his actions we try to have more of one stand up meeting to keep track and talk about problems and solutions as part of a team, is was super hard work with him at least for me, any way our final product was amazing and we were all happy with the result