Decision Making and Professionalism

It's extremely critical to express ideas in the professional world. Expressing individual idea makes an individual appear more professional and confident. However, expressing one's idea, an individual can be a "problem solver" or a "whiner” (Savickas, 2013). Therefore, there is the need to timely consider when to express an idea and when not to. Besides, it’s important to consider the need and the positivity of the concern. Looking at the ethical dilemma where a duty officer for the Soviet Union got an alert than an American missile was coming and thought it was a computer error and didn’t report, was in one way professional. This is because, reporting this case, would trigger the Soviet military to respond with a nuclear weapon. This would mean that the US feeling threatened, would retaliate and launch their missiles and this would likely cause the death of hundreds of millions of people once a conflict disrupts global temperatures. Therefore, the officer prevented a nuclear war.

On the other hand, the officer breached instructions and can be perceived as duty dereliction. This means that the safest action to take would be passing the responsibility to his commanders and assist in making a decision. In a study by Goztepe & Kahraman (2015), decision making especially in an uncertain environment is all about making choices between alternatives and the outcome is not predictable. This means that there is a need to follow the chain of command while making these decisions. Moreover, decision-making involves identification of the problems, construction of the preferences, evaluation of the alternatives and lastly, determining the best alternative. This is an indication that the decision by the officer was unprofessional and any chance of unreported missile attack would create big conflict within the country. In conclusion, the officer in one way acted professionally and saved his country and the world of a world war, though on the other hand, was unprofessional and his action failed to follow the military decision-making process.

Managing Difficult Situations

Studies reveal that most people always wish to avoid difficulty and potentially stressful situations (Seery, 2011). More studies indicate that, regardless of what an individual does in life, challenging situations will ever occur at both personal and work life (Kim, 2014). This is an indication that challenging situation is inevitable. Other studies indicate that these challenging situations require to be corrected immediately since once ignored may result to worse situation. Handling these situations with grace and openness creates lesson which is critical in life rather than ignoring a situation (Harmon et al., 2013)

One of the most notable methods of dealing with challenging situation involves acknowledging the difficulty Situation, developing a plan to deal with the situation, seeking assistance where necessary, changing what an individual can deal with, and identifying what can’t be changed. At this point, it's important to note that, an individual should not waste time and energy trying to change things that are not changeable. However, this does not show that an individual should ignore the situation. This is followed by developing coping skills to deal with individual feelings and focusing on what an individual can gain. Lastly, procrastinating is never part of problem-solving therefore should be avoided.

Another notable approach to dealing with difficult situations is the STAR approach. This includes; Situation where an individual start by briefly describing the context of the difficult situation. This is followed by –task whose aim is to show what an individual had to do. The other step is action/approach where an individual moves on to the actions to tackle the difficult situation. Lastly is the result where an individual with the final results is encouraged to talk about the end results to highlight how individual actions lead to a good and positive outcome (Zarkowska & Clements, 2018).

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References

Goztepe, K. and Kahraman, C., 2015, March. A new approach to military decision-making process: suggestions from MCDM point of view. In International Conference on Military and Security Studies (pp. 118-122).

Harmon, K.G., Drezner, J., Gammons, M., Guskiewicz, K., Halstead, M., Herring, S., Kutcher, J., Pana, A., Putukian, M. and Roberts, W., 2013. American Medical Society for Sports Medicine position statement: concussion in sport. Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, 23(1), pp.1-18.

Kim, H.K., 2014. Work-life balance and employees' performance: The mediating role of affective commitment. Global Business and Management Research, 6(1), p.37.

Savickas, M.L., 2013. Career construction theory and practice. Career development and counselling: Putting theory and research to work, 2, pp.144-180.

Seery, M.D., 2011. Resilience: A silver lining to experiencing adverse life events? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(6), pp.390-394.

Zarkowska, E. and Clements, J., 2018. Problem behaviour and people with severe learning disabilities: The STAR approach. Routledge.