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Case 30

Buddy Jefferson

Background Information

Margaret Williams believed very strongly in working hard to do her best. During

her four years in the Accounts Payable Department, she did just that and was

rewarded with good evaluations and two promotions. Just three months ago, she

had been made assistant manager of the department. This was a newly created posi-

tion that involved managing the daily operations of the department’s four-member

staff. Margaret had immediately liked almost everything about her new job assign-

ment, including the challenge and additional responsibility. However, she also had

suspected that this promotion signaled a further deterioration of her boss’s standing

with the company.

When her boss, Bill Mobley, was terminated two weeks ago, she was not really

surprised. The strain between Bill and the company, which had been churning

beneath the surface, finally erupted, and the events that led to his release happened

very quickly. As a result, Margaret was made acting manager of the department.

She was told that this situation was temporary and would change when “all the dust

settled.” Nonetheless, she hoped and expected the promotion would be made per-

manent soon.

Things seemed to go well during her first week on the job. She was busy, but she

liked the challenge of learning and doing new things. She thought that if the first

week was any indication, managing the department would be both easy and

rewarding. However, her optimistic outlook began to fade during the second week,

when Buddy Jefferson entered the picture.

Just four weeks ago, Bill had hired Buddy to work on some special projects. This

was two weeks before Bill was fired. At first, Margaret had limited contact with

Buddy and knew very little about him or his assignments. During her second week

as acting manager, though, this all changed very quickly as she started to receive

complaints about Buddy from various employees in the department. She started to

pay more attention to him and discovered that the complaints were well founded.

Buddy seemed to do three things that were creating problems. First, Buddy’s

work was often late and contained a number of errors. Even though Buddy had prior

bookkeeping experience in Accounts Payable, that experience was in a different

industry. Margaret knew that the systems and procedures used here were somewhat

advanced and unique to this industry; anyone new to this system would have prob-

lems. On the other hand, Margaret felt he had been on the job long enough so that

he should be doing better than his recent work indicated. She also knew that Bill

Mobley had always done a notoriously poor job in orienting and training new

employees. She gathered that Buddy was no exception and that he was most likely

inadequately prepared for this job.

Buddy’s second problem was, as a few of his coworkers put it, he didn’t “pitch

in.” Rather than help answer the phones, for example, or volunteer to help someone

50 Case Studies for Management and Supervisory Training

146

Case 30 (continued)

else look up information or complete a report, Buddy seemed content to sit at his

desk and let others do it. Yesterday she had watched him let the phone ring at the

desk next to his as he got ready to go to lunch.

Finally, Buddy did not seem to get along very well with the others in his unit and

made no apparent effort to get to know them or to be friendly. Since his coworkers

were busy anyway, just the slightest hint of a cold shoulder from him meant they

would make no effort to meet him even halfway. Through a confrontation that

Margaret had just heard about, he had even made an enemy of one of his coworkers.

Margaret knew that she needed to take some action, but was not quite sure how to

proceed.

CASE QUESTIONS

1. What is (are) the problem(s)?

2. How should Margaret handle the situation?