Summary of Topic
American SteelCo. has been a successful company in providing materials as well as accurate prices and estimates. This is thanks to a system that was created by one of their long time employees, Collin. As essential as Collin's program has been for over the last decade, it has also become a major source of conflict for many other workers and the four previous Supervisors who have been placed over Collin. Now that Suzy is in charge, she is determined to make the process smoother by addressing the concerns of the other employees and by making adjustments to the system that have caused frequent errors in price estimates and material discrepancies.
What is Causing Problems?
Collin has worked at American SteelCo. for 12 years and has seen four supervisors come and go within that time. Regardless of who is supposed to be in charge, Collin feels that he is the head of the office since his programming is the foundation for the sales that the company has. However, seniority is not how leadership is determined at American SteelCo. Collin is having a tough time accepting that since although someone else is in charge, he is still the one who trains them on the use of his system. This training has skewed his thoughts on the Pyramid of Power and he has overstepped many boundaries. On top of the many complaints that workers and supervisors are having with Collin, the complaints that customers are having due to the system are growing even more concerning. Help and support has been offered but immediately turned down by Collin himself because of an outright refusal to believe that his system could be flawed in any way.
What communication barriers are present?
There are many complications happening between Collin and Suzy. Because of the past relationships Collin had with his supervisors, feedback has not been something he has received. When he does receive feedback from Suzy, he does not receive it well. Sometimes he turns to silence when she wants to discuss changes. He makes no effort to build a relationship with Suzy, or even exchange information with her. There is a stalemate of communication between the two employees, and it certainly needs to be resolved.
3 ideas to improve this situation
Since there are many moving parts in this situation it can seem daunting to solve. Here are a few ideas we thought up that could be helpful to solving this type of communication issue.
1. Numbers and Statistics. Often, taking a visual statistical approach will make complicated reporting easy to understand. Create charts, graphs, or other visual tools to show what's happening in an infrastructural sense, instead of trying to giving lengthy and hard to follow verbal explanations. Your look at the facts will be hard to disagree with.
2. There may be communication biases within the organization such as Affinity Bias, Attribution Bias, and Conformity Bias. In order to avoid these biases we can bring in a group of analysts that can look over the current business operations and give a report to share with the organization of ways they could improve.
3. Standardization. This could greatly improve processes. Even just asking Collin to make a handbook of the programs would be great so it's not just all in his head. That would also make him replaceable if needed in the future.
In order to solve the issue, make sure you are trying Internal and external remedies to the problem. This can be bringing in a team of analysts and internally working on information transfer within the organization at the same time
References
Andrade, M. S. (2019). Organizational behavior in practice. Dubuque, IA: Great River Learning.
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