Augustina Artos, a 25 year old female graduate of Harvard Business School, has just been appointed to the job of Director of Finance in a medium size business. Her immediate junior in the business, Jacob Jones is a 53 year old long term employee of the business. He was passed over for her job.
Referencing this week’s material create the opening interview between Artos and Jones on her first day. Identify all the issues that might be suggested by this fact pattern. In your conversation with Jones be sure to have Artos deal with all the identified issues using her “leadership relationship building skills”.
Learning Activity 2
Top executives and board members of a large international bank in New York are meeting to consider three finalists for a new position. The winning candidate will be in a high- profile job, taking charge of a group of top loan officers who have recently gotten the bank into some risky financial arrangements in the Middle East. The bank had taken a financial bath when the dollar dove in the past few years especially in their Yemen office because of their risky loans. The board voted to hire someone to directly oversee this group of loan officers and to make sure the necessary due diligence is done on major loans before further commitments are made.
Although the bank prefers for decisions to be made as close to the action level as possible, they believe the loan officers have gotten out of hand and need to be reined in. The average age of the all-male group is 39. The effectiveness of the person in this new position is considered to be of utmost importance for the bank’s future. They are also aware that certain cultural differences have made the problem even harder to solve. They need a candidate who will know how to work with the Yemen employees and has some knowledge of the customs and language of the country. After carefully reviewing résumés, the board selected six candidates for the first round of interviews, after which the list of finalists was narrowed to two.
Both candidates seem to have the intellect and experience to handle the job. Before the second-round interview, the board has decided to ask you to devise a set of questions that will help to elicit the information as to how familiar the candidates are with handling the cultural diversity issues the job will present. For your information one candidate is female the other male. The male candidate is 34 while the female is 36. Both candidate are attractive and single. In addition to the reading for the week you may want to research on the internet some of the cultural bias issues unique to the Yemen culture. (Hint consider women in the Arab workplace)
Learning Activity 3
Joan has a necklace business and has developed her jewelry designs to a point that she has been running a million dollars yearly gross sales. However, a group has made similar designs and sold them to QVC and HSN about six months ago. She was working with them up till now. In the last six months her sales dropped twenty percent. In fact she can see a real dip coming in the next month. However she has picked up three new national chain stores which should pick things up considerably. The sales won’t make the profit columns until next year. If she can convince her staff to take a significant pay cut she will be able to reinstate their full salaries in the 9 to 12 months.
Create the first few paragraphs of the speech that she will give in the hopes of keeping her employees. You may add facts to the scenario or add to your speech anything you think is reasonable for after the 9-12 months. However, adaptability and change are the paramount ideas that Joan must address in her leadership actions.
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