Course - Performance management

SPECIAL INTRUCTIONS:- Written paper should be no less than 2 full pages but no more than 4 pages.

(Word count 800-900 Approximately)

Thanks in advance.

Background Information Lucie Williams believed very strongly in working hard to do her best. During her four years in the Accounts Payable Department, she did just that and was rewarded with good evaluations and two promotions. Indeed, just three months ago, she had been made assistant manager of the department. This was a newly created position that involved managing the daily operations of the department's four-member staff. Lucie, had immediately liked almost everything about her new job assignment, including the challenge and additional responsibility. However, she also had suspected that this promotion signalled a further deterioration of her boss' standing with the company. When her boss, Dale Mobley, was terminated two weeks ago, she was not really surprised. The strains between Dale and the company, which had been churning beneath the surface, finally erupted, and the events that led to his release happened very quickly. As a result, Lucie was made acting manager of the department. She was told that this situation was temporary and would change when "all the dust settles". Nonetheless, she hoped and expected the promotion would be made permanent soon. Things seemed to go well during her first week on the job. She was busy, but she liked the challenge of learning and doing new things. She thought that if the first week was any indication, managing the department would be both easy and rewarding. However, her optimistic outlook began to fade during the second week, when Jill Johnson entered the picture. Just eight weeks ago, Dale had hired Jill to work on some special projects. This was two weeks before Dale was fired. At first, Lucie had limited contact with Jill and knew very little about her or her assignments. During her second week as acting manager, though, this all changed very quickly as she started to receive complaints about Jill from various employees in the department. She started to pay more attention to her and discovered that the complaints were well founded. Jill seemed to do three things that were creating problems. First, Jil's work often was late and contained several errors. Even though Jill had prior bookkeeping experience in Accounts Payable, that experience was in a different industry. Lucie knew that the systems and procedures used here were somewhat advanced and unique to this industry; anyone new to this system would have problems. On the other hand, Lucie felt she had been on the job long enough so that she should be doing better than her recent work indicated. She also knew that Dale Mobley had always done a notoriously poor job in orienting and training new employees. She gathered that Jill was no exception and that she was most likely inadequately prepared for this job. Jill's second problem was, as a few of her coworkers put it, she didn't "pitch in". Rather than help answer the phones, for example, or volunteer to help someone else look up information or complete a report, Jill seemed content to sit at her desk and let others do it. Yesterday Lucie had watched her let the phone ring at the desk next to her as Jill got ready to go to lunch. Finally, Jill did not seem to get along very well with the others in her unit and made no apparent effort to get to know them or be friendly. Since her coworkers were busy anyways, just the slightest hint of a cold shoulder from her meant they would make no effort to meet her even halfway. Through a confrontation that Lucle had just heard about, she had even made an enemy of one of her coworkers. Lucie pulled Jill's file and discovered that Dale gave Jill an exceptional probationary review score. As well, the file also indicated that the performance planning for the current period revealed that in the current performance planning cycle Jill's goals, targets, and objectives were all extremely easy to achieve. Maybe too easy. At a management team retreat, a fellow manager indicated to Lucie that she was pretty sure that Dale and Lucie were cousins, but nobody could confirm the allegation. Lucie knew that she needed to take some action, but was not quite sure how to proceed. FINAL PROJECT QUESTIONS 1. What is (are) the problem(s)? 2. What should Lucie do about the situation and how can she get things back on track from a performance Your written paper should be in Word, Pages, or PDF format, no LESS than two (2) full pages in length, but n MORE than four (4)