Case Study Promotions #4

Bus231-003

Professor A. Bailey

April 09, 2017

Case Study # 4

Summary

At Chisum Industries, the promotion process allows for a wide variety of options, laterally or vertically, for middle managers to grow and promote themselves through their hard work and expertise. Final candidates for promotion opportunities are brought to Dallas for interviews with top level management. In March 2011, Marcus Chisum, Karl Jacobson, Mitch Ivey, Wayne Hughes, and Barbara Kennedy gathered for a meeting to choose a candidate for the top position in San Antonio. When the middle manager Harry Creighton was being considered, many employee reviews included referencing Harry as “nice” and “always willing to help”. The top managers began to discuss if Harry had the skills to be a top-level manager or if he was just popular with his employees for his allowance of slacking. They ultimately decided that Harry is not to the point of being a top manager, but they planned to help Harry through ways to fully expose his potential.

Observations

We noticed a few things about this case. First we noticed that the selection team knows and realizes that Harry does indeed have potential to be a great manager and candidate for this job; although, Harry does seem to need some improvements to his management style. Another aspect of the case that we felt went unnoticed was whether or not the employees whose word their taking were spoken to about how they are to respond to questions. Maybe they have more meaningful

input, but they didn’t want to risk him getting in trouble or they didn’t know how detailed the selection team wanted them to be; so they choose to call him “nice.” The last thing we noticed about the case is that if the assumptions about Harry were correct, it seems that Harry doesn’t delegate that well. He seemed to have issues with helping his employees, perhaps too much. There is a fine line in management where they should be helpgul and engaging but not too much where they now appear as a coworker rather than a manager.

Case Questions

1.) Nice to us, means that someone is happy, polite, and has manners. As far as the term nice in a management sense, we see it as flat and non-aggressive. Being nice wouldn’t be a bad trait in management if it was a small trait. However in this case Harry is being called “nice” by most of the employees which is actually not a nice compliment. Being nice is one of Harry’s main traits. Mitch was right when he couldn’t recall calling any of his managers being just “nice.” It doesn’t seem like a normal response for employees

2.) The term and description of the word “nice” in this specific case most definitely coincides

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