Increasingly they would go out to lunch together with friends from their old company, and within six weeks, another manager was hired. That week I was called into the COO's office and he told me that instead of running reporting and analysis I was to train all customer service reps on a new system they had been avoiding -- and bad mouthing -- for years. I felt pushed aside, everyone in the company knew the system he asked me to train them on was a relic, it had been around for over a decade and maybe 10% of the company used it. I accepted the challenge, went to work on training the employees. During that time the new COO had several offsites that included the new management team, none of us who had been at the company before. The attitude of the new management team was "we're here to clean this place up." I increasingly felt like I didn't fit in and eventually left for another job.
In retrospect I could have used the OCEAN strategy to...
Also, the values of the new management team seemed to not be so much on internal job satisfaction but on completely re-defining the business from the ground up. It would have been belter to have used many of the techniques in the class to better understand the COO's priorities and direction. In addition the expectations of the new management team needed to be better understood. Instead of reading the exclusion from off-sites and the strong associations the new management team had as exclusive, it would have been better to have looked at it from a developmental perspective. Concentrating on why the training on the legacy system which was universally despised by many of the employees in the company, as a priority would have also been valuable insight. Given the task of getting the employees to use the legacy system was not very appealing yet managing others and motivating them was.
