CASE 30 Buddy Jefferson Background Information Margaret 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 wa: newly created position that involved managing the daily operations of the de- partment’s four-member staff. Margaret had immediately liked almost every- thing 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, Bill Mobley, was terminated two weeks ago, she was not re- ally surprised. The strains between Bill and the company, which had been churning beneath the surface, finally erupted, and the events that led to his re- lase happened very quickly. As a result, Margaret 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 to 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 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 Buddy Jefferson entered the picture, Just four weeks ago, Bill had hired Buddy to work on some special projects. This was two weeks before Bill was fired. At first, Margaret had limited contact with Buddy and knew very little about him or his assignments. During her sec ond week as acting manager, though, this all changed very quickly as she started to receive complaints about Buddy from various employees in the de- partment. She started to pay more attention to him, and discovered that the com- plaints were well founded, Buddy seemed to do three things that were creating problems. First, Buddy's work often was late and contained a number of errors. Even though Buddy had prior bookkeeping experience in Accounts Payable, that experience was in a different industry. Margaret 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, Margaret felt he had been on the job long enough so that he should be doing better than his recent work indi- cated. She also knew that Bill Mobley had always done a notoriously poor job 30.1Fifty Case Studies for Management & Supervisory Training in orienting and training new employees. She gathered that Buddy was no ex- ception and that he was most likely inadequately prepared for this job. Buddy’s second problem was, as a few of his co-workers put it, he 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, Buddy seemed content to sit at his desk and let others do it. Yesterday she had watched him let the phone ring at the desk next to his as he got ready to go to lunch. Finally, Buddy did not seem to get along very well with the others in his unit, and made no apparent effort to get to know them or to be friendly. Since his co-workers were busy anyways, just the slightest hint of a cold shoulder from him meant they would make no effort to meet him even halfway. Through a confrontation that Margaret had just heard about, he had even made an enemy of one of his co-workers. Margaret knew that she needed to take some action, but was not quite sure how to proceed. CASE QUESTIONS 1, What is (are) the problem(s)? 2. What should Margaret do about the situation? 302