Reputations

One’s reputation is extremely important in today’s society.  What others think of and how they view you holds a lot of weight.  Depending on whether ones reputation is good or bad can be an influence on how others perceive them.  In a world dominated by social media and how easily news is able to spread, reputation is more important than ever. 

I believe that reputations are easy to develop, but hard to break.  Be it good or bad, people’s perceptions do not change quickly.  In high school I had the reputation of being a very dedicated and studious student.  I was in honors classes, sports teams and president of several clubs.  Because of my involvement in so many activities, I was friends with lots of different groups of people, but I never really had a specific group of friends.  Between studying and my extracurricular activities, I often did not have time to make for my friends as well.  While my studious and high achieving nature led me to be voted most likely to be successful for our senior superlatives, I wanted to improve upon my reputation going forward.  In college, I wanted to make a change.  I did not want to my reputation to be just about what I was capable of doing.  I made the effort to lessen my involvement with outside activities so that I could better work on relationships.  I am also a naturally shy person, so I really tried to make an effort to step out of my comfort zone and be more spontaneous.  Since high school, I have developed the reputation of being much more outgoing and less focused on my own accomplishments to an extent.  I am still very concerned with doing well; I just do not make it my whole priority.  Seeing acquaintances from high school now sometimes takes me back to my old self.  Despite how much I have changed, the perception of me that they have is one of a much more serious person, and I feel like I need to maintain that around them because it is what they expect.  My behavior sometimes reverts back to how I used to be because I feel like that is the reputation I need to uphold.

Another example of my experience with reputations goes back to high school as well.  I will note that I went to an all-girl high school so gossip was everywhere.  Coming in freshman year, one girl had the reputation of being a bully in grade school.  I had heard from several people that she was mean and hurtful to them or their friends.  When both I and that girl ended up joining the swim team, I had the preconceived notion that she was going to be a terrible person.  I did not want to be friends with someone who had that negative of a reputation, because I did not want to be considered a bully by association.  However, as the season went on, I developed a different relationship with the girl.  She confided that yes, she had been mean in grade school, but did not want to be like that anymore.  Over the four years, we eventually became good friends.  However, despite her reputation changing with me, I believe that when it comes to those she hurt in the past, there is nothing she could do to fix their perception of her.  Some people’s actions are too serious to be able to change the reputation they have.  But this also goes to show how one person can have several vastly different reputations depending on who you talk to.  For me, I know her as a funny, sometimes overly sarcastic friend, while for others; she will always be the girl who hurt them.  

Triangle Model

The standard principal agent model often takes on a triangle shape when one member must answer to both a superior as well as a client.  This can produce a series of issues and challenges.  From differing in opinions, to conflicting viewpoints, it can be difficult to please everyone involved in a triangle relationship.  Coming from several service related jobs, I know firsthand the struggles of a triangle principal agent model.  Below I will analyze and discuss some personal experiences with this version of the principal agent model.

To begin, I will again discuss my job at Nordstrom because in the retail setting, one is constantly trying to please not only their managers, but especially the customer they are helping.  The department that I was working in was the most expensive and exclusive in the store.  Because of this, we had several sales people who were considered personal shoppers.  A personal shopper was a sales employee who had been working within the Nordstrom store for long enough to have developed a list of clientele who shopped exclusively through this employee.  They differ from regular sales in that they are not so much on the floor trying to push merchandise to those just browsing.  Rather, they are taking phone calls from and meeting with repeat customers they have worked with for sometimes years.  These personal shoppers know when their customers are coming in and have pieces picked out and waiting for them when they arrive.  There are a series of benefits that come with the personal shopper title, including the ability to be more flexible with setting their own hours and a slight raise in commission.  One requirement of being a personal shopper was to meet a yearly financial selling quota.  If one could not meet this quota, they would lose their shopper tittle and go back to normal sales.  Another requirement of personal shoppers is that in addition to helping their typical clients, any customer can call Nordstrom customer service and schedule an appointment with a personal shopper at random.   This is where conflict would often arise from a triangle situation.  

Nordstom as a brand prides itself on its commitment to giving any and all customers a luxury shopping experience.  Because of this, they want shoppers of all budgets to be able to utilize the personal shoppers.  When a personal shopper gets assigned to a first time client through a customer service call, they often do not know much about that customer.  In my department, where sales employees and personal shoppers are used to customers spending several hundreds of dollars on their purchases, this lack of information became a problem when the customer had a smaller budget than my department coworkers were used to.  Everyone understood that most people could not afford to buy our specific product, but when the personal shoppers had a strict quota to meet, they are expected to maximize their sales as much as possible.  Personal shoppers were feeling pressure because what the customer needed and what managers expect from the employee were often different.  Managers would push personal shoppers to upsell, or get the customers to buy from the more expensive department, while the personal shoppers were trying to please the customers who wanted to stick to the less expensive sections.  This conflict left the personal shoppers in a position in the middle of trying to please two groups with differing viewpoints.  I feel that the biggest contributor to this conflict was the lack of communication.  The best way to resolve this would have been for customer service to gather information about the customer prior to assigning personal shoppers.  If they asked the customers what type of budget and experience they want from their appointment, they could better schedule the shoppers with those whose budgets aligned, satisfying the customer and the managers.  Simply spreading information could have reduced ambiguity and this cause of conflict between managers and employees.  This clarification would better give the customers a good experience  becuase they are dealing with a personal shopper who knows the merchandise they are trying to sell, rather than one who is not inspired or enthused about the product.  

Workplace Conflict

Organizations often employ people of various backgrounds and personality types.  While the goal is to have all employees get along and work in harmony, sometimes these variances can lead to issues, or conflict.  Conflict in the workplace is inevitable, especially in large scale or stressful jobs.  Often, the conflicts can be resolved amongst those involved in the situation, but there are certain instances where management needs to become involved. 

I can thankfully say that I have never personally been involved in conflict in the workplace.  I am also lucky that between all of my former jobs, there is only one issue that comes to mind.  Unfortunately, this conflict started between two employees and resulted in the termination of one of them.  This occurred shortly after I had started working at a restaurant.  The issue was between two male employees, I will call them Employee A and Employee B.  Employee A used to date a female coworker for several months before the relationship ended.  From my understanding, the break up was not a good one.  Due to summer vacation, several months passed where Employee A and his ex were not around one another.  At the restart of school, Employee A found out that his ex-girlfriend and another coworker, Employee B had begun dating.  This led to a lot of tension because all involved in the situation were still currently working.  Management was aware of this issue, but there was not much that could be done.  One day, when Employee A and B were off, they both ended up being in the bar at the same time.  After several drinks and an exchange of words, Employee A punched Employee B.  The next day, management called Employee A in and he was ultimately fired. 

This conflict is definitely not the norm in a workplace and it escalated more than a normal conflict would.  I believe that there were several conflict resolution and management issues at play here that led to the extreme outcome.  First and foremost, I believe that the alcohol involved led Employee A to lose sight of his emotional intelligence.  In any normal interaction, Employee A was civil to both Employee B and his girlfriend.  With the addition of alcohol, he was unable to deal with emotions and relationships the same way he would have normally.  I also believe that management could have further prevented this issue.  The management knew that Employee B and the girl had started a new relationship shortly after it happened.  They should have seen this as a potential conflict from the beginning.  Intuition and judgement should have given them a heads up that there might be a problem in the future, especially knowing that workers have access to alcohol and often hung out after work.  To be fair, they were in a tough position.  All of the employees involved were senior members and important to training new members which often put them working together.  I believe that they took a low advocacy and low inquiry approach which led to them being passive in their conflict resolution pre altercation.  One thing I believe that they absolutely did right was to terminate Employee A immediately after the incident.  He was completely in the wrong with hitting another person under any circumstance.  Their swift action in not only firing him, but having him banned from the premise set the tone to others that physical violence will not be tolerated.  This was a high advocacy and low inquiry approach in that they took strong action and while they listened to both sides of the story, there was not many other options with how to handle the situation.