Discussion

Your nonprofit organization, one concerned with stimulating and communicating innovations in local government, is headquartered in the western United States. Despite your organization’s physical location, you have long recognized the importance of having a number of regional representatives in various parts of the country also on staff. You feel that these representatives would help identify innovations, share information about their local government practices, and more importantly, help stimulate new memberships among local governments in their areas. While you would communicate with the regional representatives regularly by phone and email and see them in person two or three times a year, for the most part they would be out there “on their own.”

When you present your proposal to your board, they are highly supportive of the idea of having regional representatives but want to be sure of a couple of aspects of the remote team of employees before providing their approval. First, they want to ensure that the regional representatives would receive what they need from the organization in terms of support, encouragement, and a sense of belonging to the organization. Second, they want to know that the regional representatives would be properly “managed” and held accountable for their work.

Consider the communication strategies and effective management skills that you learned about in your assigned textbook readings and answer the following questions in your discussion post:

In your initial post:

1. In order to secure your board’s approval for the team of regional representatives, discuss the communication strategy you would create for managing these remote employees.
2. If conflict were to arise between you and the board regarding the need for the remote regional representatives, what conflict management techniques would you employ in this situation?

In your response:

3. Select one of the communication strategies posted by your classmates and discuss how it is different or similar to your own ideas.

Posting

After your initial post, reply to two or more of your classmates’ postings (three additional postings are needed for an “Exemplary” grade).

Initial responses and replies should be at least 150 words and of high quality.

Make sure to support your opinions with fact and resources. All sources should be cited in proper APA format.

Do NOT:

• offer advice to your classmates
• simply only agree or disagree with your classmates

Grading

This assignment will be graded using the Discussion Board Rubric. The Discussion Board is worth 50 points toward your final grade. Use the information in the rubric as a guide toward successful completion of the module Discussion Board.