SUGGEST "APPROACHES TO DEAL WITH EACH OF THIS CASES" Vignette 1: Fire alarm in Bucharest An engineer from the Bucharest

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SUGGEST "APPROACHES TO DEAL WITH EACH OF THIS
CASES"
Vignette 1: Fire alarm in Bucharest An engineer from the
Bucharest office of a global company describes a recently
experienced situation. We were sitting at an extraordinary staff
meeting in a windowless office in our company’s building in
Bucharest. Almost all of the Romanian office people were invited to
listen to a big boss from Munich. One could clearly see that our
local managers were trying to do everything possible to leave a
positive impression with the guest from headquarters. Our local top
brass people were smiling and nodding all the time when the visitor
spoke, and the Romanian general manager was even taking notes on
his tablet computer, something that he never does. The visitor from
Munich was talking about the responsibility each of us had for
cutting costs. Suddenly the meeting room went completely dark and a
fire alarm sounded. Everyone stayed sitting at their places,
waiting for instructions. The visitor from Munich went silent, but
our local bosses for some reason were silent too. Finally someone
from the audience lost patience and shouted: “For how much longer
are we going to sit here? Do you want to burn here? It’s time to
get out.” People jumped from their seats and started making their
way to the exit. They were stepping on each other’s feet and
bumping against the furniture. When we were finally out of the
building it became clear that a fire had started in one of office’s
electric rooms, and firefighters were already handling it. Luckily,
nobody was injured. When the situation cleared, the engineer found
himself thinking about the behavior of the managers in this
situation: Vignette 2: “Michael is an excellent analyst. It’s time
for him to become a manager” Michael heads a team of analysts in
the mergers and acquisitions department of a large company. He
joined the company 11 years ago after graduating from university.
During those years he has earned a reputation as an intelligent and
reliable professional who always completes tasks to the highest
quality and whose reports can always be trusted. After becoming the
head of the analytic team he continued to strengthen his reputation
as a reliable employee. Michael’s team often has urgent and
unexpected tasks. When an acquisition target is identified, all the
analysis needs to be completed quickly, as competitors often
consider the same firms to be acquired and, therefore, support for
quick decisions is needed. In such emergency-like situations the
analysts, including Michael, often work around the clock. Following
the tradition of working to the highest possible standard, Michael
always double-checks the calculations made by his team before
passing them onto the management. In difficult cases he runs models
and calculations himself. Michael has a couple of team members whom
he considers to be the most reliable workers, and whom he trusts
with the major tasks. Recently one such employee broke her leg and
had to stay in hospital. Michael considered passing this
colleague’s work on to one of the recently hired analysts but
decided against it. He chose to do the work of the sick colleague
himself, as explaining to the newcomer what he wanted from him
would have taken too much time and the result wouldn’t be
guaranteed anyway. Michael recently received the results of a
360-degree assessment mandatory for all managers of his level in
his company. Among the qualitative comments that respondents could
leave in the process of the assessment he found the following ones:
Michael is an excellent analyst. It’s time for him to become a
manager. Michael is constantly on the run. He is always busy. He
never finds time to sit down with me and explain what he wants.
Michael distributes work unevenly. Some people are overloaded while
others often sit idle. It is high time Michael stopped doing what
he likes most, namely models and calculations. Michael’s boss has
already told him that he needs to delegate more and find time to
participate in cross-functional projects. However, Michael believes
that if he does not get personally involved in every task the work
quality will suffer. Vignette 3: Conflicts in Prague Two managers
engage in a dialogue over coffee in a conference room minutes
before a weekly management meeting at the London headquarters of a
major European company. A: I often see you coming to the meeting
with a suitcase. Are you travelling again? B: Yeah. I have a car
booked for the airport at six. There is a conflict again between
our production manager and the commercial manager in Prague. I need
to go there to mediate their conflict and help them work together.
They are like a cat and a dog with each other. A: Why not fire both
instead, and hire adults who know how to work with other people?
It’s ridiculous that they can’t resolve their issues without
involving you. Do you really have the time and energy to chaperon
them and keep them from killing each other? B: They are good guys.
They’ve just been through too much stress recently. The last
several months were very tough. We have just started gaining new
orders and attracting competitors’ clients. Unfortunately, one of
our key suppliers in the Czech Republic went bankrupt. As a result,
commercial people sell, but production falls behind due to delays
with the supply of components. People work round the clock, and we
exercise a lot of pressure on them from here in London, demanding
quick results. Sometimes we put too much pressure on them. I think
right now we need to show them some support, as they can’t take
further demands and threats from us. А: If you don’t threaten them,
you’ll get no results from these people. B: I have analyzed the
situation and I understand that they are doing their best, that
they know their problems and ways of handling them, and that they
are on the right track. They just need a bit of time to get out of
the rut. It is important to me to make sure that they don’t kill
each other right now. I have large hopes for the Czech Republic
next year. It’s my job to take some time now to help them overcome
their low points. Vignette 4: Training lessons that didn’t work A
husband who returned home from work later than promised, tells his
annoyed wife at dinner about his experience at work that day: Just
yesterday I was telling you that they had put all of us through a
training session where they taught us that managers needed to use a
variety of styles depending on the followers and the situation. I
decided to try it in practice today. They told us that if a manager
wanted to gain people’s buy-in and increase their sense of
responsibility for the outcomes he or she needed to put them
together, ask for advice, allow for a difference in opinions, run a
discussion, and so on and so forth. We are just facing this topic
of the optimization of our supplier relationships. So at the end of
today’s management meeting I decided to raise it. I thought people
could use their brains, feel that we are all in the same boat and
show their joint commitment. So I start talking and see immediately
that the head of purchasing is getting rather nervous. I guess he
thought that this issue should have been discussed with him first.
It’s ok that he is nervous, as long as other people talk, I
thought. And other people do start talking. The head of supply
chain management jumped in immediately. He’s that kind of a guy –
he has an opinion on every topic. Then the head of production
joined in, bringing a couple of reasonable points to the table. He
recommended a new potential supplier, and the arguments sounded
very interesting. Unfortunately, my boss, the division senior vice
president, hates that company. There is some issue that goes back
in history, and all I know is that just mentioning that company’s
name would drive my boss crazy. Under no circumstance would he let
us use that supplier. My people don’t know that, and I can’t tell
them so. Meanwhile, my people are getting very excited. The head of
purchasing overcomes his nervousness and joins the discussion, and
he is also excited about this potential supplier. People got so
engaged that they even failed to notice that we were far beyond the
workday limits. Only the HR manager was sitting there with a bored
faced, constantly looking at her watch, and the head of accounting
was playing with her phone. At the end I had to stop all the
excitement and simply say that they shouldn’t dream about that new
supplier and that we would return to the topic at the next meeting.
People’s enthusiasm died immediately and they all left quickly. I’m
sitting here now and thinking that if I hadn’t listened to the
advice of those trainers, I would have come home in time for dinner
tonight. Vignette 5: Attracting R&D talent Helen, senior VP of
human resources at BioFuture, a Basel-headquartered life sciences
giant corporation, sat thinking about engaging regional heads of HR
in a new employer branding campaign and long-needed efforts of
promoting the company and its brand among students and graduates of
Biology and Biochemistry programs at universities in various
countries. With the growth and diversification of the company’s
product lines, it has become necessary for BioFuture to invest
heavily in proprietary research. With the recently announced
increase in R&D efforts and the decentralization of the R&D
function with an emphasis on creating centers of excellence in
various regions of the world, the company has faced significant
talent shortage in many of its countries of operation. In some
parts of the world the few existing experienced R&D
professionals were approaching retirement age, while the talented
ones among university graduates were choosing different companies
to work for or academic research careers. Almost each young
scientist at BioFuture’s operations in Asia, Latin America, or
Eastern Europe was a valuable resource that was treated as a
treasure. An analysis of work preferences of young scientists had
shown that their motivation and expectations were significantly
different from other categories of employees at BioFuture. Unlike
the commercial staff, production personnel, or corporate functions,
people in those regions were, as internal research showed,
primarily interested in stable jobs with good pay. Young R&D
candidates expressed preferences for the freedom of organizing
their work, the ability to interact with the academic community
beyond BioFuture (which was a big problem for the secretive
commercial people), and having a say in the direction of R&D
activities undertaken by the company. Many survey respondents said
that it would be important for them to know that they were working
on ethical research topics, and that their own work at BioFuture
could contribute to their subsequent employability in the academic
world. Helen knew that it would be difficult for regional HR
organizations to recruit and hire the necessary R&D talent.
Traditional recruitment and selection approaches that still worked
well for the production and commercial sides of the business – and
that local HR managers knew well – wouldn’t work for young
scientists. The HR group at headquarters developed job description
templates, compensation package guidelines for various countries
and regions of operations, and general recommendations for
developing relationships with key universities. Helen was very
proud of this work done by her team in Basel. Now it was time for
the HR functions in various countries to understand the importance
of the new efforts and accept the recommendations and guidelines
prepared by the central HR. Helen also knew that the local HR heads
would need the full support of their direct bosses – country level
general managers, all of whom grew from the commercial or
production parts of the organization. Vignette 6: Developing
employees Margarita firmly believes that any manager should be
evaluated by his or her ability to grow and develop subordinates.
One of her direct reports, Nicholas, is a great example of a return
on investment made by the boss. Margarita singled out Nicholas from
his early days of employment in her department. Nicholas was always
ready to take responsibility, asked for additional assignments, and
sought advice on professional literature for further development.
Margarita started to expand the circle of Nicholas’s professional
responsibilities. At times she would establish the deadlines for
the completion of tasks delegated to Nicholas a bit before their
actual due time in order to fix potential problems, if any arose. A
couple of times she had to spend long hours with Nicholas reworking
the reports and presentations prepared by him and exploring ways of
correcting the mistakes made. Once she asked Nicholas to take her
place and present at an important meeting. Margarita had to live
with her own boss’ commentaries that half an hour could have been
saved during the meeting had the presentation been done by
Margarita herself, and not an inexperienced young person. Margarita
took the time to explain to the boss why she wanted to give
Nicholas a chance and that his first-time presentation was good
enough for the circumstances. Of course, she had to handle a pretty
tough post-mortem discussion with Nicholas after that presentation
grilling him over every point that could have been done better. A
month later, however, she put him in the presenter position once
again. This time there were no negative comments from her boss.
Margarita can’t help comparing Nicholas with another employee of
hers, Eugene. She tried to expand Eugene’s circle of
responsibilities, but always heard back from him how busy he was
and why it was impossible for him to take on additional tasks. With
any criticism, Eugene would immediately become defensive and find a
thousand external reasons rationalizing why he couldn’t do things
differently. Eugene completes standard tasks with due quality, but
he is not ready to go an extra mile for anything that goes beyond
his job description. He tries not to stay at work a minute longer
than the standard hours, because in the evening he is busy in the
regional chapter of one of the political parties. Sometimes
Margarita hears stories about the probono projects Eugene is busy
with as part of his political party activities. Her rage overwhelms
her when she thinks that this apparently talented and energetic
young man doesn’t want to use her support and achieve more at his
workplace.