Management theories and their practical applications

Management Theories

As the supervisor of a team of six employees, my responsibility was to ensure the highest levels of customer service were delivered to each customer, regardless of their request for service over the telephone, Internet or via e-mail. My team of six customer service representatives had varying degrees of ability and empathy, in addition to perspectives of their jobs. For a few they saw the ability to drive up the metrics of performance as a means to further their careers in the company. Their approach to mastery and the strength of the causality of performance, modeled by performance awards and recognition for exceptional performance, made these employees the easiest to manage. The more troublesome employees looked at the job as a necessary evil, one step above working in a fast food restaurant. Their metrics of performance were quite poor, and the approach they had modeled, as evidenced by observation and discussed, was more aligned with the contented model defense.

Sarcastically greeting any requests for improvement, this latter group did the minimum to get by and promptly left at the stroke of the hour when their shifts were done. Incentives, both financial and emotional in terms of recognition, were continually promoted and discussed in staff meetings. The higher-achieving group of employees tackled additional work, over and above what they were presently doing, to win additional awards. This only distanced the other, lower-performing employees more. From the perspective of the lessons learned in this course and from previous experience, I realized that using generative reasoning, causal modeling and assertive inquiry together could help me understand why these lower-performing customer service representatives did not respond to incentives. Counseling these workers one-on-one to see if I could assist them to find more fulfilling work in the company was seen as an attempt on my part of get them out of my department. Clearly there was little if any trust between each of them and me. Despite this I continually worked to create a more integrative environment, one that stressed openness and the opportunity I wanted to give them to pursue what their passions were. Instead, I was continually rebuffed and treated as if I was not to be trusted, and that my efforts were all self-serving to get them out of my department.

As our company's business became slower and sales were beginning to decline, all supervisors including myself were called into budget and expense meetings. Starting off as discussions as to how we could control costs and leading to discussions of a potential for regional office closings and reduction in force (RIF)s or lay-offs, the meetings became increasingly tense and other supervisors confided that they did not like the direction they were going, and frankly, neither did I. From the unique vantage point of being in these meetings and then through continual observation of sales activity in telemarketing, our own departments' drop-off on service calls, and the lack of new business contracts announced on the company's Intranet, it became clear that sales were indeed slowing down significantly. The hypothesis I had of a major RIF or lay-off coming was turning out to be correct. The next budget meeting all supervisors were asked to define the top three employees they must retain and rank those that should be let go. My boss was in all meetings and told me to just use the metrics of performance we had standardized to manage performance. She specifically said this would also be the most equitable as it would be based purely on performance. Well aware of the challenges I had faced with the low performers in the team I supervised and their attitudes, she concluded our conversation with comments stating these people had their chance to improve and didn't take it, so they would need to be let go given the budget cuts. It was the most painful day of my life as a supervisor, and knew the low-performing people I had tried so hard to help improve or find other positions that better suited their interests would take it very personally. There could be no capitulation, my boss said, and there is no advance warning either as it would just create terrible morale with everyone else in the group. Stoically I went back to my cubicle and buried my head in work for the afternoon. Within two weeks the official word came from our CEO and our Director of Human Resources that the RIF would be on the following Monday and each supervisor would escort the employees being let go to Human Resources for their exit interview. I was to attend each interview and present their results, which I did. The exit interviews were quite stressful yet Human Resources did the majority of the talking and offered assistance. When appropriate, I offered to assist them in finding work as well, yet none of those employees let go ever did get in touch with me.

Diagnosis of What Failed

In managing a team of customer service representatives that were tasked with responding to customer complaints over the Internet via the company's website, over the telephone or over e-mail, the challenge of keeping employees motivated despite the nature of the work continually required integrative strategies to support and anticipate their needs. Taking purely a conventional stance to managing this team would have created a consistent level of mediocrity, not allowing the highest performers the freedom to define how the position fit their specific skills and inherent abilities.

The paradox of managing these teams however was the need for specifically focusing on how to bring more ownership to their roles by redefining the responsibilities on the one hand, yet still infusing enough accountability through measures of performance on the other (Alexander, 337). Further, the attempts within Human Resources to infuse a high level of empowerment were failing due to options being made available to these employees not being relevant to them. As empirically derived research indicates, for empowerment to be effective it must concentrate on enriching mastery and identity aspects of a person's view of themselves (Sharma, Kaur, 7, 8).

This paradox of infusing ownership in conjunction with the need for creating accountability and transparency with regard to performance was crucial for the department to attain its objectives. Clearly the use of existing models was not effective in infusing any ownership in the positions. Further, the lack of logical reasoning in terms of building trust by giving lower-performing employees the opportunity to gain greater mastery (LaBrosse, 101-105) and opportunity to have a high degree of individuality in their approach to doing their jobs as well was not present either.

Due to all these factors and low-performing employee's reliance on using the contended model defense (Olson, et.al.) to justify their lack of ownership and buy-in to the measures of performance, the potential of nurturing trust never occurred. As this entire scenario illustrated, the foundation of any successful empowerment program must be focused first on trust (Bartram, Casimir, 4, 6). In retrospect this was one of the most critical shortcomings of our company's strategy to deal with lower-performing telemarketing representative. We often concentrated first on metrics and less on trying to understand their specific perspective and thereby create trust in the process.

Tactical, short-term and incentive-based in approach, management strategies initiated both within my department and from Human Resources concentrated first on incentives, second on trust and therefore had no consistency. As has been shown in empirical research in the areas of management theories, the creation of consistency and predictability in management strategies is essential for lasting change in performance to take place (Brownlie, Hewer, Wagner, Svensson, 461, 462). Further, the lack of flexibility on the part of low-performing employees and their adherence to the Contended Defense Model (Olson, et.al.) made change all the more difficult.

Yet even more fundamental that these challenges was the need for gaining their trust and leading them to make the most of their own unique strengths, regardless of their current position in the company. At the crux of what failed is the lack of communication and trust based on a lack of integration beginning at the Frame Choice level, as defined in the context of the concepts and insights gained from this course. The lack of congruency and shared values led to a completely different perspective on the implicit value of the position they were working within, and further led to a complete failure to brainstorm potential options to overcome the conditions they felt were present being a customer service representative. Further still was the lack of identifying unacceptable solutions that would serve as the basis for finding entirely new solutions. Instead what occurred was on their part a contented model defense emerged. The inability on my part to navigate their perceptions to an integrative option was evident in how difficult it was to even get these employees to discuss what their interests and passions were and how they could potentially be modeled into a position in the company.

In seeking to serve them I had become seen more as pedantic and self-serving in attempting, from their perspective, to get them out of my department. In fact I sincerely wanted to help them find positions where they could excel. The lack of trust on their part and the acute resistance to change was so strong that structuring for integration to the point of even defining what conditions needed to be changed to overcome shortcomings and design a new position for them was not possible. As trust was not present and despite my best attempts to earn it through being genuinely concerned about them, all attempts were seen more as patronizing and less about attempting to help them. On the occasion that they did ask for pay increases, I told them they would need to get their cumulative customer satisfaction scores up and also call volumes. Not interested in the position or excelling at it, these employees refused to improve and when let go, saw it as very personal given my continual efforts to help them improve their performance.

Management Theory Potential Solutions

Clearly what was needed was more of a systematic and cohesive development plan that didn't first concentrate on nurturing trust, but more on shifting their perspectives to see an integrative model approach to conflict resolution as the best possible alleviate the frustration they felt with their jobs (Brownlie, Hewer, Wagner, Svensson, 461-47).

In attempting to counsel and guide them out of their frustration, I had actually been fueling the part of the contended defense model, further strengthening their approach to conflicts at work through a conventional stance. As a result, trust was eroding and the perception of opportunities to take greater control of their jobs and the metrics that could have been used to prove their mastery of it were rejected. Inevitably when the company began to experience reductions in sales and had to cut costs, the lowest performers were let go, ironically fulfilling the scenarios that these employees' Contended Defense Model had scripted through perceptual bias. I specifically had failed to recognize the strength of these lower performing employees' Contended Defense Model (LaBrosse, 101, 102) and the significantly different perceptions they had of their jobs as a result.

What would have been a more effective strategy on my part and a potential solution for ensuring my entire department attained job ownership and also was able to excel on the metrics of performance for their positions would be to rely not on one-on-one discussions which were only seen as patronizing, but to focus instead on observing the patterns of what made these employees excel at certain tasks and not in others. There were those specific tasks completed in serving Internet-based customers where the quick response and ability to increase response figures very fast were their strongest contributions to the company. Yet on e-mail and over the telephone, their responses and customer satisfaction figures were quite low and even prompted Human Resources to inform me they would need to be put on probation if they did not improve. The pattern that began to emerge from this integrative thinking could have led to only placing them on a single type of customer service channel, specifically orientated to quick feedback and rapid closure. My highest performing customer service representatives were those capable of completing closed service calls regardless of the channel they were inbound from. Delay in gratification from closure did not bother them; they seemed to have created their own casual model of how their total efforts contributed to the higher satisfaction scores, yet the lower-performing members of the team did not. Further, from a pattern analysis of their behaviors and their tendency to rely more on interactive, not interpersonal feedback, their tendency to enjoy working completely alone, only with a computer would have also become evident. As customer service is by nature an interpersonal career, been with more foresight to rely on integrative model-based approaches to redesigning their jobs so they could have excelled at the metrics of performance they felt the most in control of (Chen, Chen, 279, 280).

From these accumulated observations it also became clear that their perceived lack of ownership was more about wanting to retain their own identity in what they perceived as a faceless customer service organization, again relying on Conventional Stance to the Contended Model Defense (LaBrosse, et.al.). Clearly more effort in understanding and appreciating how significantly different their perspectives were of their positions and the need they felt to not conform led to the development of a hypothesis that low performing call center representatives needed to be screened for their level of affiliation need, level of frustration with fast vs. slow feedback, and the need for creating more integrative management and coaching strategies with these subordinates.

In retrospect, these employees could have been also turned into high performers by concentrating first on their innate strengths and showing them through frequent feedback how their role was unique. Their perception of being faceless and just another customer service representative, which led to their sense of not being in control of their jobs, could have been countered with a more effective strategy of integrative management and learning that concentrated on challenging them to change their casual model of customer service work. Specifically the role of customer service representative not being seen as negative or even lower class but of one that is integral to customers getting their goals accomplished as well. The casual models of these low-performing employees had become so engrained in their Contended Model Defense (LaBrosse, 104) that any attempts to break this perception was rejected and seen as insincere and patronizing.

The challenge of any manager is to break the causal model that low performing employees have so they see themselves as being capable of enhancing their own identities and excelling at their roles at the same time. Causal models of these employees, as observed from discussions and daily interaction, saw customer service work as being the most unattractive work in the company and an area that was full of frustration and no validation or satisfaction.

Breaking this Contended Model Defense that the lowest performing customer service representatives had would have best been first been better accomplished through continual assertive inquiry on my part and continual causal modeling as well. As these employees saw themselves as faceless, lacking any individuality and therefore having no ownership of their jobs, it would have been far better to have looked at casual models of their behavior over time and started to find integration points with their perception of the job and the company. The offers of assistance were largely ignored because the employees had no idea what they needed help with. Using assertive inquiry in conjunction with causal modeling, the employees could have eventually seen there were opportunities for them to continually grow and find uniqueness and identity in their work. Their low performance scores were not due to lack of skill, it was because their insistence and lack of willingness to change from their strong reliance on the Contended Model Defense that made any strategy for change in the short-term nearly impossible. The development of change management strategies for them based on integrative modeling, tailored and scaffolded by their unique strengths, would have been far more effective. Scaffolding or the development of individualized learning programs that isolated on their strengths (Najjar, et.al.) aligning specific metrics of performance to the strengths would have been far more effective and potentially saved them their jobs in the company. Further, this would over the long-term create an opportunity for reciprocal assertive inquiry as well, giving them the opportunity to learn how they were perceived in the company and their potential there as well. In short, by relying more on a tailored and scaffolded plan for each of these employees, not punitive in nature but more aligned to assist them with their unique strengths as they applied to the customer service role, their performance over time could have vastly improved. The causal link between these factors and the generation of trust would have been much longer term, yet the foundation based on assertive inquiry and causal modeling would have been an excellent start.

The ability to transform these employees' performance also is directly related to the ability to give them opportunities to gain mastery of specific aspects of their job, in addition to providing plenty of opportunities for originality in how they approach their jobs. First from a mastery level, each of these employees had a specific skill in this area, with structuring of solutions being their collective strongest skill set. Skillfulness however was not present as the Internet-related inquiries simply required a rapid response, often short, and with the control over closing out the complaint on their own. This element of control over closing out a given complaint became a mild form of recognition between customer service representatives, as they compared the speed at which they could complete Internet inquiries. it's as if the low achieving employees only found this metric relevant; they ignored all others. Through asserting inquiry it was learned that the option of responding either as fast or slow as needed and being as thorough as possible gave this group of employee's satisfaction. There was not time limit on Internet inquiries, and a few of these employees, upon being let go, shared that they had begun creating taxonomies of common Internet issues and could readily cut and paste responses to common problems, driving up their scores significantly as a result. None of the supervisor or managers knew this was going on until these lower performing customer service representatives left. The employees' customer satisfaction scores indicate that at times customers knew they had received a cut-and-paste solution statement yet the content of the message had been sufficient to solve their problem. The beginnings of mastery of Internet-based complaints were beginning to get in place without any supervisor or manager knowing it. Yet this taxonomy of responses did not translate well into free-form e-mail and telephone-based complaints, and in exit interviews one representative mentioned the frustration of trying to serve so many different types of request so quickly with limited information on how to solve customer problems. These lower-performing employees had found an approach to master Internet-based complaints that were highly structured in nature with equally highly structured information. Yet mastery of the other aspects of the job including e-mail and free-form telephone calls conflicted with their approach to perceiving the work and given their inflexible and often rigid thinking, actually fed their conventional and often negative perception of the remainder of the job. From a mastery standpoint, their ability to become skillful with just the highly structured complaints that led to well defined solutions, planning that was predicated on a quick response and recognition by total Internet inquiries closed gave this specific group of employees control over this one aspect of their jobs. The development of a basic taxonomy, highly structured in scope to match the high level of structure from Internet inquiries, also assisted them to gain a level of control over their jobs. Mastery of the more freeform and as they perceived them, chaotic nature of telephone and e-mail complaints were directly against their Contended Defense Model however and their metrics of performance showed it.