50 Case Studies for Management and Supervisory Training

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Case 48

Look Out Ahead

Background Information

When Tom Miller was hired to head Genco’s Administrative Services Division, he

was ready for the job. After 20 years of managing procurement and logistics in the

military, he knew something about running these important support activities. Now,

after three years with Genco, he had the entire operation running fairly smoothly.

As head of Administrative Services, Tom was responsible for three areas: pur-

chasing, document storage and processing, and the mailroom. The mailroom was

supervised by Rodney James, 32. There were eight people in the mailroom who

handled the volume of internal communications, mail delivery, and supplies distri-

bution needed to keep Genco running.

Replacing the supervisor in the mailroom was one of the first challenges Tom

faced at Genco. Not long after Tom was hired, Genco began receiving customer

complaints that money they had sent was not being received. Tom carefully moni-

tored events for a period of about two weeks, found the mailroom manager was

stealing the money, and fired her. Tom took a chance and promoted Rodney James

to the position. At that time, Rodney had worked in the mailroom for two years, but

he had no supervisory experience.

As Tom thought back on it, he was generally pleased with the results: Rodney

emerged as a very capable supervisor. He was good with his employees even if he

was not so effective as a delegator. Because of his tendency to do too much of their

work himself, he was continually “fighting fires” but doing no planning.

Lack of planning and foresight was something that Tom could just not under-

stand. Effectively anticipating future conditions and making plans accordingly was

a learned instinct in the military. Rodney’s inability to make even the most simple

plans was incomprehensible to Tom. Indeed, Tom was good at making such plans.

He knew how to make forecasts of project milestones, estimate budget require-

ments, perform workload estimates, create controls, prepare planning documents

and reports, and execute a host of related techniques. To him, it was second nature.

Tom’s frustration with Rodney’s poor planning skills was coming to a head with

the system conversion now underway at Genco. This conversion was a system-wide

process of changing from a manual, paper-based operating system to an electronic,

area-networked, integrated database system. In short, the system conversion that

was to be fully operational in two months meant a drastic reduction in paper. And

this meant a major change for the mailroom.

Moreover, the start-up for the new system was timed to coincide with the start of

the new budget year. Tom had been cautioning Rodney for the past few weeks that

he needed to prepare a budget that reflected a better workload and staffing plan.

Tom had other concerns about the staffing arrangement in Rodney’s area. The

biggest concern was the large gap in job titles and grades between Rodney and his

50 Case Studies for Management and Supervisory Training

258

Case 48 (continued)

staff. Rodney was a grade 12 supervisor, while everyone else was a grade 8 com-

munications specialist. There was a grade 10 position called senior communications

specialist that was open. Some of the communication specialists had longer tenure

in the department than Rodney and were very capable.

Tom thought there could be two problems here. First, Rodney was not creating

any backup for himself, in effect, contributing to his delegation problems. By mov-

ing a few specialists into a senior specialist category, he could give them greater

responsibility and ease his workload. Second, Tom was afraid that unless something

like this was done soon, the more capable employees would leave to find better

jobs.

Tom mentioned these concerns to Rodney on several occasions. Each time,

Rodney would say, partly out of sincerity and partly out of frustration: “Yeah, yeah,

I’ll get around to it soon.”

But “soon” never seemed to come.

CASE QUESTIONS

1. Is this a disciplinary or coaching problem for Tom? Is it a problem at all?

2. Outline and describe a coaching process Tom should follow in working with

Rodney.