OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Choosing an Organization Worksheet

The organization I have chosen to study during the duration of this course is
Starbucks. I choose this specific organization because it has made major impacts in my
life and has been the company I have been with the longest. I have now been employed
with Starbucks for six years and have encountered many situations that have been both
positive and negative. I am looking forward to being able to review a situation and break
it down into the four different frames that we will be learning about throughout the
remainder of this course. The four frames will include structural, human resource,
political, and symbolic (Bolman & Deal, p. 16). As for the organization I have chosen I
am sure that the majority of you are aware as to what the company is, but for those of you
who may not have heard of Starbucks I would like to give you a little knowledge on the
company. Starbucks is one of the top coffee companies in the nation. It has a multitude of
stores stretched out across the United States and has even expanded to different countries
all over the world. The company has grown over the years and expanded their markets to
reach a multitude of different people and their lifestyles.

My role within this organization is a shift supervisor which would be considered

an internal role for I am required to be present for each of my shifts. Within my role I am
responsible for carrying out duties such as deployment, assigning tasks to be completed,
completing inventory counts, doing pulls, and so much more. Every day I am presented
with different situations and need to be able to handle each with their own approach to
solving and handling them. My role also includes being able to interact with not only
customers but also with the other employees that I see throughout my shift. When it
comes down to interacting with my own employees it can be a daunting task because I
don’t want to offend any of my employees, but I also need to ensure that they are staying
on track and getting done what is needed. Over the years of being in my position I have
gotten better at being comfortable with how I approach the things I need done by my
employees. I have learned how to read situations and approach them with the best
intentions and directions, so everyone involved feels included and not singled out.

The situation that I am going to focus on is from when I was first becoming a shift
supervisor in a new store where no one liked me. I had to not only make the transition
from barista to shift supervisor, but I also had to do this while transferring into a new
store that I had only worked at a handful of times before. It was a very intimidating
process to try to get accustomed to a new store with new partners all while trying to learn
a new job and the requirements that came along with it. That being said I would like to
give a little more of the background story on the situation that I was about to face. Having

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 only been with Starbucks for one year I was approached by another manager from a
different store asking for me to apply for their shift position because she was always
amazed by my hard work whenever I was a borrowed partner at her store. Knowing that
this would give me a substantial pay raise at the time I decided to apply and see what
would happen. I was instantly given the job upon having the interview with the manager
and was going to start in her store after their remodel was finished. At first things seemed
to be going very well, but after a while I started to notice that my partners were not
willing to do what I asked of them and it began to feel like pulling teeth when I would
ask someone to complete a simple task. This went on for about a month of constantly
pulling at the bit to get people on board with how I approached situations. After staying
consistent and ensuring my new team that what I was doing and asking of them would
make things easier for them the realization become true. My partners finally started to see
that my approaches to getting the job done made less work and less stress for all of them.

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 Reference

Bolman, L. G. & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing organizations: Artistry, choice, and leadership
(6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass