Adult Development Counseling Case Study: We Make Widgets

Executive Assistant Observations

Roger's contribution to this counseling project was indispensable because it provided a helpful, objective perspective on all three individuals. He advised that the CEO is clearly motivated to a fault and absolutely unreceptive to concerns voiced about her personal wellbeing. On the other hand, Roger noted that because the CEO is so motivated to succeed, she is perpetually receptive to any idea with potentially beneficial business results. Roger also observed that while the CEO believes her work ethic is inspirational, this is not actually the case; the organizational culture it inspires is probably a main reason that employee morale is low and turnover rates are high.

According to Roger, the COO has become reliant on him to compensate for the COO's increasing hearing loss. This reliance appears to magnify any apparent decline in the COO's performance, while also taking up Roger's time unnecessarily — a situation compounded by the COO's reluctance to use e-mail communications. Roger's impression, however, is that the COO could still function effectively and provide valuable services to the company if he were more willing to adapt appropriately to his increasing limitations.

Roger advised that the CFO seems to suffer from self-caused stress at work by overemphasizing the overall importance of her role in the organization, and that she has clearly been allowing non-work-related stress to affect both her performance and her wellbeing.

Counseling the Chief Executive Officer

The CEO is a highly driven individual motivated by achievement. Her style of working and living meets many of the formal criteria for compulsion (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2007) that manifests itself in what is frequently described colloquially as "workaholism." Counseling her requires an understanding that her professional drive is likely attributable to personal psychological issues more complex than can be identified, analyzed, and examined within the context of this short-term counseling program.

At least in the relatively short term, the best approach should focus on helping her recognize the degree to which elements of her professional style and leadership messages are detrimental to her admitted primary concern in life. Since any direct suggestion that changes are necessary for the benefit of her personal health tends to elicit only martyr-like responses and restatements of her commitment to her career, even bona fide health concerns should be presented within a strategic business context. Therefore, issues relating to her health should be addressed in terms of their potential to undermine her career and company performance, rather than in purely personal terms of medical health and physical condition.

In the realm of leadership, the goal of this counseling program for the CEO is to help her understand that her personal style may inspire detrimental aspects of corporate culture at WMW Inc. that undermine strategic objectives. Counseling also aims to deepen the CEO's understanding that the example she sets substantially determines the corresponding styles at the executive management level, which invariably extends through the chain of command and vocational hierarchy (Blair, 2003; Locker, 2000; Myers & Spencer, 2004). The most successful approach has proven to be accepting her professional motivation as a premise and emphasizing the strategic importance of certain behavioral and executive leadership changes for the benefit of her career and the company's success. The CEO has responded positively to this strategy precisely because it does not require her to examine or change personal psychological responses, stating: "It's so much easier to talk about reasons that my behavior might be detrimental to business than to talk about why my behavior is bad for me or what it is that causes me to work so much."

The principal suggestions for this individual were to: (1) consider the long-term negative effects on business performance of her leadership by example, including low employee morale, high turnover rates, and the unnecessarily high human resource expenses associated with them; (2) specifically communicate to her executive staff that her vocational style is not to be used as a model within the corporate culture; and (3) honestly consider the long-term business and career consequences of ignoring the medical and physical toll of workaholism, regardless of the degree to which she wishes to discount health consequences for her own sake.

The principal difficulty in counseling the COO effectively is his tendency to resist change. Fortunately, he is personally aware that others have noticed signs of his fatigue and forgetfulness, and he has expressed specific fears that they might attribute these signs to age-related cognitive or dementia-causing conditions. Counseling this individual would have been considerably more difficult had he been in complete denial — or simply unaware — of the situation (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2007). Another advantage is that one of the specific counseling suggestions related to compensating for his hearing loss also at least partially addresses his concern about others' perceptions of any apparent decline in his performance. Additionally, the COO understands that declining performance is a legally justifiable basis for eventual termination, whereas his age alone is not (Halbert & Ingulli, 2007).

The COO expressed that he relies heavily on face-to-face exchanges with colleagues and direct reports, admittedly because he has always been resistant to change and uses e-mail infrequently compared to standard contemporary business practices. His seniority allows him to assign Roger to receive and print his e-mails, and his colleagues and direct reports are well aware that electronic responses are not to be expected — a phone call or face-to-face discussion will follow instead. Most of those who work with the COO have informally redirected their e-mails to Roger, whose communications are then transmitted as messages on the COO's behalf.

Counseling the Chief Operating Officer

Given the COO's progressive hearing loss, the first counseling recommendation is for him to finally make the transition to standard e-mail communications — a shift he has resisted for more than a decade. Beyond concealing any apparent hearing difficulties, this transition would actually create the opposite perception: that the COO is evolving with the times and modernizing his working practices.

With respect to his personal situation, relevant questions would include those concerning his sentiments and sense of obligation toward his mother-in-law. To the extent that his concern is driven primarily by his wife's wellbeing rather than a direct emotional bond, one suggested option would be to offer to contribute financially to professional long-term care arrangements, allowing him to continue working rather than retiring to provide direct care. Another suggestion would be to consider a partial retirement or a negotiated reduction in hours and compensation, enabling him to continue contributing to the company without exceeding his gradually diminishing capacity to maintain the same schedule.

The principal difference between counseling the CFO and her two colleagues is that her sessions addressed personal issues that have indirectly impacted professional performance, rather than performance issues rooted in underlying personal psychology. Most importantly, counseling for the CFO has consisted mainly of: (1) examining the effects of non-work-related stress on work performance; (2) reconsidering her perceptions of interpersonal motivations and obligations within the family, given their capacity to generate additional emotional stress that affects her work detrimentally; and (3) examining the accuracy of her self-assessment regarding the role she actually fulfills in the organization and correcting any inaccuracies in that perception.

Relevant lines of inquiry included those necessary to provide an overview of the CFO's responsibilities and her impression of their operational importance to the company; those necessary to quantify the external stress caused by the adoption and substance abuse problems of her son; and those designed to identify the source of her egocentric tendency to regard her son's problems as something being done to her (Gerrig & Zimbardo, 2007).

Suggestions to the CFO included: (1) recognizing that maintaining an unrealistic perception of her role and its operational importance unnecessarily increases work-related stress beyond what the position inherently demands — accepting a more accurate view would meaningfully reduce that stress; (2) identifying specific sources of non-work-related stress often creates opportunities to address them individually and mitigate their impact; and (3) inappropriately attributing her son's behavioral problems to their effect on her career increases her own stress and likely reduces her chances of helping him resolve his difficulties successfully and with minimal damage. Options for this individual included temporarily reducing her hours to better manage aspects of her personal and family life in the short term, and securing competent family and adolescent counseling during some of her non-work time.