After reading the case study below, answer the following questions:

As the manager of the training department: 1. What options do you have to address the accusatory emails that are flying back and forth between Debby and Brian? 2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each of your options? 3. Given which one of these options you think is the best, what, if anything, are you going to email or say to them? 4. Since this continues to be a problem, what are you options at this point in time? What are you going to say to Brian? To Debby? 5. How do you respond to Brian's request to reassign or fire Debby?

You've just been promoted! Your mentor, after many years of making sure you have the correct managerial skills, has just retired. Because of the skills she instilled in you, you have been promoted to take her place. You've worked with your mentor to review all of the new duties you will be taking on, but within one week of taking over, you find that there is situation for which your mentor has not prepared you. The department you run has ten professionals who address skill development for a large multi-national company where you work, Quality Care. All of the professionals use one administrative assistant, Debby, to manage the flow of paperwork, to plan the logistics for the skill development seminars, and to prepare the reviews of the training sessions. Debby has been doing this job for about seven years and, as far as you know, completes all of her duties efficiently and accurately. Quality Care has been implementing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software package and your department will train the different operating departments on how to use the software. One of the trainers, Brian, has been working with the software company to learn the new functions of the program, so that he can prepare training materials and schedule training sessions for Quality Care employees. Brian has just returned from a three week training session with the software company and seems very excited to start the training of Quality Care employees. He has developed training materials for the purchasing department because that department is the first department to be trained. He asks Debby to reserve a training lab, talks to the IT department to make sure that the software is available in the computer lab, and submits his training materials to the reproduction department. As the first day of the training session nears, Brian emails Debby to make sure that everything will be ready for the first day of training. She gets confirmation that IT has made the new ERP software available in the lab and in turn confirms that with Brian. She keeps pressing the scheduling department about the room reservation and follows up on the progress of the training materials. On the Friday before the training session is set to begin, Debby emails confirmation of the reservation for the computer lab and puts the training materials near Brian's mailbox since the materials are too big to fit in his mailbox. Brian confirms the time and place of the training session to the members of the purchasing department and picks up the training materials. He feels confident that everything is in order for the training sessions to begin on Monday morning. On Monday morning, Brian gets to the computer lab early to turn on the computers and place the materials on the desks for the purchasing department employees. As he tries to access the computer lab, he finds that the access code he has been using no longer works. He calls the training department, but since the training is starting earlier than normal business hours, no one is in the department office. Next he tries security and security says that they can send someone to open the computer lab in five minutes. During the time Brian is waiting, the purchasing

2 department employees start arriving for their training session. So when security finally lets Brian into the computer lab, Brian feels a little bit disorganized and realizes that he will have to rush the morning training session to keep to his training time schedule. Brian, while a little rushed, does get through his agenda in the morning session and lets the purchasing department employees go for lunch. Brian goes to his office, feeling a little bit stressed because of the problem with the room code, to get a quick lunch and prepare for the afternoon training session. As he reviews the materials for the afternoon session, he finds that one part of the training materials is missing. He immediately fires off an email to Debby asking her why the training materials are messed up and why he didn't get the right code for the computer lab. He copies you on the email. Debby answers Brian's email stating that she did send the code for the computer lab to him while he was in training at the software company and that she will follow up with the reproduction department about the mix up on the training materials. When Debby sends the email, she hits reply to all, so you get a copy of her email. Before returning to the training session, Brian replies to Debby saying that he knows that she never sent him the room code and accuses her of being negligent because she didn't catch the mistake in the training materials. Again, Brian copies you on the email. By the time that you get back to your office from a meeting that reviewed the implementation of the new ERP system and all of the training sessions your department will have to prepare in the new few months, you get a quick sandwich to eat while you are catching up on all of the email that you received during the morning. You start with the most recent emails and work backwards, so the first email you see is the one where Brian accuses Debby of not sending him the code and making a mistake with the training materials. You know when the new code was issued, because you got the notification in an email forwarded from Debby with the new codes. You look at the list of recipients on that email and see that Brian was copied on it. While you are typing a reply to Brian, giving him a date when the original email was sent, an email arrives in your mailbox from Debby to Brian. This email states that Brian must not be diligently looking at his email because she sent the email with the new code to all department employees ten days prior to the start of his training session. She also says that if reproduction made an error in the training materials, it wasn't her fault and Brian must have provided them with incorrect instructions. In an email to you, Brian launches into a rather involved retelling of all of the things that Debby is doing wrong. He claims that she is inefficient because she can't get room reservations in time for the training sessions, doesn't provide timely information on the room codes and continually allows errors to get through on his training materials. He then makes a strong suggestion that you take up these issues with Debby and, in fact, he thinks the best thing would be to reassign her to a different department or fire her. Even though your desk is piled high with new projects and information you have to review to get a better sense of your new job, you realize that at this point, you know you have to reply to both Debby and Brian and try to calm the accusatory tone of their emails. You don't need this problem today, so you decide to take a minute and think about the best approach.