SKILL PRACTICE – Team Exercise(s):
The Team Exercise is a tool we’ll use for you to actually practice using this skill set (Empowerment) in a realistic scenario!
Work with your team to discuss the following Team Exercise(s): 1) Deciding to Engage Others, 401-402
Then, submit a written report in the form of an uploaded Word document.
I provide table 8.3 and 2 with phtos
401
Deciding to Engage Others
Engaging others in work is one of the most deceiving management skills because it seems so easy to accomplish. Just tell someone what to do, or ask them to become involved, and they’ll do it, right? Unfortunately, this is seldom the case, and this exercise is designed to help you determine when and how to engage others more effectively. To accomplish this exercise, you’ll need to use the framework in Figure 8.2.
For each of the two scenarios that follow, ask the following questions:
Should I involve others or make the decision by myself?
If I involve others, should I direct them to form a team, or should I consult them individually and make the decision by myself?
If I form a team, should I grant decision-making authority to the team, or should I consult with the team but make the decision by myself?
If I involve the team, should I participate in the team, or should I let the team decide?
After you have made a decision about how to handle each of these two scenarios, form a group of colleagues. Share your decision and your rationale with the team. Reach a consensus regarding the most appropriate strategy to use in each of these two cases. For comparison purposes, experts have prepared an analysis of the two cases, which is found at the end of the chapter. It is provided only to enhance your team discussion.
An Emergency Request
You are a general plant supervisor, and seven product lines involving four of your eight foremen must be disrupted to satisfy an emergency request from an important client. You naturally wish to minimize the disruption. No additional personnel are available, and time limits to complete the new project are restrictive. The plant is new and is the only industrial plant in an economically depressed area dominated by farming. You can count on everyone pulling his or her own weight. The wages in the plant are substantially above farm wages, and the workers’ jobs depend on the profitability of this plant—the first new industrial development in the area in 15 years. Your subordinates are relatively inexperienced, and you have been supervising them more closely than you might if the plant had been in a well-established industrial area and your subordinates were more experienced. The changes involve only standard procedures and are routine for someone of your experience. Effective supervision poses no problems. Your problem is how to reschedule the work to meet this emergency within the time limit with minimum disruption to the existing product lines. Your experience in such matters should enable you to figure out a way of meeting the request that will minimize the disruption of existing product lines.Your experience in such matters should enable you to figure out a way of meeting the request that will minimize the disruption of existing product lines.
Biological Warfare
You are the executive vice president of a small pharmaceutical manufacturer. You have the opportunity to bid on a contract for the Defense Department pertaining to biological warfare. The contract is outside the mainstream of your business; however, it could make economic sense, since you do have unused capacity in one of your plants, and the manufacturing processes are not dissimilar. You have written the document to accompany the bid and now have the problem of determining the dollar value of the quotation you think will win the job for your company. If the bid is too high, you will undoubtedly lose to one of your competitors. If it is too low, you could lose money on the program. There are many factors to consider in making this decision, including the cost of the new raw materials and the additional administrative burden of relationships with a new client, not to mention factors that are likely to influence the bids of your competitors, such as how much they need this particular contract. You have been busy assembling the necessary data to make this decision, but there remain several unknowns, one of which involves the manager of the plant in which the new products will be manufactured. Of all your subordinates, only he can estimate the costs of adapting the present equipment to its new purpose, and his cooperation and support will be necessary if the specifications of the contract are to be met. However, in an initial discussion with him when you first learned of the possibility of the contract, he seemed adamantly opposed to the idea. His experience has not particularly equipped him to evaluate projects like this one, so you were not overly influenced by his opinions. From the nature of his arguments, you inferred that his opposition was ideological rather than economic. You recall that he was once involved in a local peace organization and was one of the most vocal opponents in the company to the Iraq and Afghanistan troop deployments.
402,
Skill Application
Activities for Empowerment and Engagement
Suggested Assignments
8.10. Teach someone else (your spouse, a colleague, your boss) how to empower others and engage others effectively. Include the principles in Table 8.3 in your discussion. Use your own examples and illustrations.
8.11. Interview a manager about his or her empowerment practices. Try to determine what is especially effective, what doesn’t work, what comes off as condescending, and what motivates people to perform. Identify the extent to which the manager knows and uses the principles discussed in the Skill Learning section of this chapter.
8.12. Think of a situation you now face with which you would like some help. It may be a task you want to accomplish, a tough decision you need to make, or a team you want to form. Make sure you think of something that requires the involvement of other people. Write down specific things you can do to engage other people to help you. How can you help them do what they want to do while simultaneously having them do what you want them to do?
8.13. Schedule a meeting with a manager who is not very good at empowerment. (Finding such a person shouldn’t be difficult, because most leaders tend to be more authoritarian and bureaucratic than empowering.) As a student who has learned about and practiced empowerment and en
