SILICON VALLEY TECHNOLOGIES
Position: Manager, Sound Suppression (Advanced Products)
Due Date: 12/04/2013

As a manager of Sound Suppression, Advanced Products, I got an opportunity to apply concepts that I have learned in the class into practice. Company IV was able to implemented decision successfully despite many ongoing communication barriers and conflicts. Communication and influence tactics played a major role in decision-making and helped resolve conflicts within the company.
In the beginning, I felt that my interpersonal communication skills were very distorted, because I was overwhelmed with available resources and quite confused about how to prioritize given work. My feelings about the subject matter at hand acted as a barrier to communication, therefore, it took me a while to completely understand concerns regarding advanced products in my company. I feel that if I were able to talk to other managers at my company before starting the day at the company IV, I would have conducted the given tasks differently.
I experienced multiple meanings of a word as a barrier to communication. During my meeting with the Director of advance products, I was trying to explain, a “fire incident” at the supplier of advanced products. However, my director interpreted word “fire” as “a layoff situation at the supplier factory”. I tried to explain her the situation twice with words, then used non-verbal gesture to explain the word “fire”. I believed that our communication was affected by recency error. Not a long ago, we were informed that Manager of Electrical – Utility products quit the job. So, I assume that the interpretation of the word was affected by that incident. I could have eliminated this barrier to communication by sharing the article that I received from manufacturing supervisor with the Director.
I believe that my prior communication and/or relationship influenced my communication with colleagues on that day. I was inclined to trust those colleagues whom I knew beforehand and questioned those whom I met for the first time. Also, similar to me error influence my perception of my colleagues. I tended to openly communicate with colleague from my own culture. I interacted with many people with different personalities. I observed that people who appeared confident were influencing other and making quick decisions. While requirements of people who seemed confuse were overlooked.
My observations made me realize that I needed to be more confident and communicate clearly with my colleagues and superiors. I sat down for a while and prioritized my work. Instead of focusing on unrelated tasks, I decided to assort my action items according to level of importance. I realized that some of the issue needed to be addressed immediately and I started meeting associated Directors and managers. I also used corporate library to get a better understanding about the company’s suppliers, FAA requirements, shipping issues and inventory level.
To some extent I also felt emotional labor. Director of advanced products, whom I reported directly, questioned me twice about my interaction with Vice President of advanced products. I was surprised and frustrated at the same time; however, I suppressed my emotions and kept working with the Director for the entire day. I just had a casual conversation with Vice President, as he was one of my classmates. However, Director perceived my interaction with Vice President as work related interaction. I felt that this misunderstanding would have been clear through proper communication. Due to time constraints, I never got a chance to build a better interpersonal relationship with the Director.
The types of influence used within the company were both formal and legitimate, due to structure of simulation. The influence tactics were used by both upper and lower level management. These influence strategies had direct effect on the decision making system of the company. As a manager my task was to strongly influence upper management decisions through the information provided in different e-mail messages. I have not observed any illegitimate or informal types of influences. Personally, I used rational persuasion and consultation at the meeting with Director of Sales and Marketing, Advanced Products. I wanted engineering staff to have extended job role, which would make their job better and easier, and cut few of the sales people to reduce payroll costs. However, I felt that Director of Sales and Marketing used power and exchange to influence the decision. He told me that he would only accept my suggestion if he would find my reasoning better than reasoning of manager of Video Products, who asked to increase sales people. However, I tried my best to influence his decision using strong quantitative support. I know that one must change his/her influence tactic according to situation; however, I felt that no other influence approach other than rational persuasion and consultation, would have worked better in this particular situation.
In addition I observed few unsuccessful influence attempts during meeting with the president. One of the Vice Presidents at the meeting tried to persuade President with his department requirements. However, he was not prepared with adequate arguments and data and kept asking the Directors and Managers to support his assertions. So, his department requirements were ignored during the meeting. One of the manager used upward appeal to influence the President. She directly presented the issue to the President without even discussing it with the Director or Vice President. This strategy was unsuccessful because the President realized that neither Vice President not Director were aware about the situation. And the President asked manager to discuss the issue with Director before presenting it to her.
As a group, employees of the company IV did not go through different stages of group development: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. In addition, scare availability of resources affected group cohesiveness adversely. Task interdependency was high among our group, as information was flowed from managers to Directors to Vice President to the President. I voluntary went to the corporate library and provided useful information to the Director and operated as an information provider of the group. I presumed the same role through out a day and helped Director and Vice President to connect the missing dots.
Our company followed a centralized organization system. Decisions were primarily made by the upper management and the President. The President had a final say in any disputes. Majority of the decision were non-programmed because there were no set of guidelines available to resolve the problems as employees of the company IV never encounter such problems before. Also, some of the decisions were not even shared with employees, who would be directly affected by those decisions. The decision making process was not taken into account while decisions were made. As a team we failed to established specific goals and objectives. Some of the decisions were based upon instincts. We were able to identify problems at individual levels. However, due to time constraints, we couldn’t develop or evaluate alternatives. We jumped from identifying problems to implementing the decision directly. At end of the day, company IV definitely implemented some successful decisions. However, I felt that if we established company wide objective in the beginning, everyone would have worked towards achieving the same goal, instead of working towards the goals related to his/her role. Also, a horizontal communication would have helped managers to established a guideline to follow during the decision making process.
I also observed some of the sources of conflict in my company. I observed incompatible goals, differentiation, scarce resources, ambiguous rules and poor communications. I haven’t notice any constructive or relationship conflict throughout a day. The main source of the conflict was scarce resources. The budget was limited and departments’ needs were excessive.
At the end of the day, I was very pleased with the overall experience. Time pressure was high and resources were limited and I was not able to attain every given tasks; however, I got an opportunity to put myself in Silicon Valley’s manager’s shoes. I definitely learned useful information, which I will be able to apply as a future manager at the workplace.