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I am originally from Montevideo, the capital city of Uruguay, South America. I am the youngest of 3 brothers and we grew in a poor country even though we were lucky enough to have hard working parents and we always had the essentials such as power and food on the table everyday.
I immigrated to New Zealand alongside my parents when i was 11 years old. My parents believed that even with them working two jobs each times were getting harder and they had to make a crucial decision.
My father chose new zealand because he had heard that there were a lot of opportunities and the style and quality of life was better.
I arrived in this country not knowing a single word of english, having to attend school straight away became my first challenging experience dealing with different cultures, mannerisms and language.
After a few years the life here in New Zealand became a lot easier for me, picking up the language and culture of this beautiful country, by the time i finished highschool i was basically another kiwi ready to shape his future.
I graduated high school and decided to give tertiary student life a go, i attended Waikato University for 3 years and decided that i did not like what i was doing.
Since then i have been exploring the working world in many different industries , primarily the hospitaltiy and customer service one until i decided to take a chance on study once again by givnig Dev Academy a go.
One time at work i was approached by one of the workers, she seemed to be upset and somewhat scared of a situation regarding an argument with one of the managers. They had argued about how tasks were being executed in our work space, the manager was not happy with the way the worker liked to talk to customers “a little too much”.
I understood where the manager was coming from as they felt like it was slowing down customer service and productivity. But i was also aware that thanks to that worker, we had a very warm and inviting atmosphere which made people eased and happy to approach us and spend a few minutes having entertaining conversations.
I decided to ask the Owner of the workplace for a bit of his time to have a conversation, i asked him what he preferred as the owner, whether he valued more the efficiency and productivity or the atmosphere and feeling that the place had. What would represent his vision the most, he said that as much as he values effective and quick work, his priority was having a place where people felt comfortable and happy with the intentions of regularly coming back.
After knowing this information i then proceeded to inform him of the issue at hand and how we have somewhat reached an impasse in our workplace. First i shared as much information as i could, telling him both sides, then i followed with my perspective on the subject. I told him i was a firm believer that the energy that the lady was bringing to our place was almost irreplaceable as none of us would be able to emulate it if she were to leave or be dismissed.
He agreed with me and decided to call a team meeting two days later, where he acknowledged all parties involved and instead of scolding anyone he just expressed his vision and made sure everyone was aware of what our real values and intentions were moving forward.
I like to take action but i was also aware that acting rash might have negative impact on the person who approached me for help. Therefore i decided to talk to her and calm her down and reassure her that she was doing a good job. The next step was to not make a fuss, i could have easily confronted the manager, but that would have not only made the manager feel threatened and unsure about his capabilities but also it could have negative outcomes for the worker.
I did not have the information of what the owner really wanted so at this point it was one word against the other word in my way of seeing things. The chat with the owner helped to get a better perspective to decide what action to take, my goal was to make sure no one felt betrayed by my actions as i was close with most of the workers including the manager too.
I am aware that there will be situations where you cannot please everyone but i felt like this situation had a way of being resolved with minimal backlash. I value the respect and friendships of others and i do feel somewhat the need of helping them if they come to me with some problems that will in the long run involve me.
Keeping peace in the workplace was my base for my approach, i did not feel like an argument should have had the impact that it did and maybe if the worker had a different personality it would have a different outcome but i had to play with the cards i had been dealt
Looking back now on this incident i feel very proud of my actions, because not only i feel like i acted correctly, i feel like my actions made the smallest mess possible, within two days it was resolved and the manager and worker did not feel affected by the actions taken. I managed to keep the peace of the workplace which maintained the group morale high allowing productivity to also stay relatively consistent. A few years later i found out the worker became very important and acquired the role of manager
Growing up in a family that believes family is the most important thing you will ever have and experience was very important in my teenage years helping me mold myself and my mind. I was a complete different person when i was younger , my values were mixed feelings all round. I believed that meeting people and being super socially active while maintaining some stupid social status among my peers was my priority. One of my issues that i NOW understand is that i was in a rebel stage and decided to flip my morals and values in what could be known as retaliation towards my parents and family who had raised me correctly but somehow i thought i knew better. As i grew older and the time passed, i slowly made some changes that reformed me into what my parents and myself intended. I had to disconnect myself extremely from my learnings and upbringings to realise what an idiot i had become. Once that clicked in my brain, almost every situation in everyday life reminded me how well my parents brought me up. This helped me made the little changes that slowly shaped me into a new version of me
My strengths, i believe are keeping calm in situations of high stress, being able to make decisions without having to overthink, being able to work in group or individually with no issues and detecting when something is wrong for example when i start to notice that my productivity is slowing down it means i need to take a break, have an entertainment boost or drink some water or stretch a little. I feel like these things will help me get through the tougher times in the journey, i am aware that there will be plenty of tough times and decisions but my confidence is very strong and i feel adequate and up to the task. Closer to the time i will be able to make a more descriptive analysis but for now all i can say is that i feel excited about confronting these scenarios that the journey may bring.
Some of my bigger problems i believe will come from trying to overdo myself by taking a lot of work at times and not being better at spacing things out in order to keep more calm and collected. Sometimes i feel like im more than capable of taking big loads of work at a time which yes sometimes i succeed but that does not mean it was the more effective way to deal with the work. I have a feeling that this is one thing i will need to work on improving. I fear that by doing too much i will exhaust myself unnecessarily slowing me down and decreasing my productivity.
When i was doing a course for a company called ACE insurance i had to go to Auckland for 2 weeks and attend a class for those two weeks. We got put into 2 groups of study and we had to study together and do the homework as a group.
Due to differences in personality and styles there was a few differences in approach and our first 3 nights of study were not quite succesful as we took a long time to finish the work and we did not get to go to bed until late due to everyone wanting to have the work done for the next day etc.
The younger people wanted to share the workload evenly which is more than understandable but we also had people who were over 50 years old and they were having issues with some of the work, this was making a couple of the young people a little stressed and annoyed. One other person and myself decided to talk to everyone and share a new tactic on how to handle the work.
Instead of sharing everyone'ss work evenly we decided to share the work more efficiently.
Two people will read the work and come up with a way to take their time to explain the task that was asked of us. The accountant in our group was taking all the mathematics and number involving questions, answering them and explaining to the rest in a much more simple way of how things worked. We gave the task of coming up with customer service situations (as the homework asked) and different types of solutions to the person who had been working with customers for 8 years.
In plain words we decided to look at people's strengths and use them to increase our productivity instead of feeding everyone the same amount of work even though it sounds fair that way we knew that we were getting no where because you are only as good as your least efficient member. Our study went from having 5 hour study sessions to having 2 hours session with the work done and dusted, one thing that helped a lot was the morale, once everyone felt comfortable with the group and the dynamic, everyone seemed happy and a lot of chit chat and joking around was happening too, making us come together and forming a nice friendship for the rest of the course.