OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Structural Frame Worksheet

Worksheet Objectives:
1. Describe the structural frame
2. Apply the structural frame to your personal case situation

Complete the following, making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

I want to reference a situation within my first team. The situation refers to my team meeting
we had about talent and succession planning. This meeting referred to touch on all five
perspectives; Structure, Human Resource, Political, Symbolic, and Ethical. The meeting's overall
summary had to do with the how, when, and what ways we approach succession planning and
talent acquisitions.

Throughout the meeting, many indicators of our structure were not well built for a successful
meeting. Our team's few indicators were the lack of alignment with how we assess talent and
identify we pipeline talent upward within the organization. The second was the work's human
resources side; our organization has taken an aggressive approach to our inclusion and diversity
agenda. This opened up many areas that we are weak in that do not contribute to the I&D
initiatives. We have taken additional steps to ensure that our talent across the entire US business
has an equal and equitable opportunity to apply for any job/position within the organization as
long as they have the basic qualifications. Our market is piloting this program until the full
rollout occurs. This is causing our team to disagree and different views on how we approach this
work, but our HR team has set expectations about the initiative and allows no room for error. As
for the meeting's political side, many personal opinions and biases were present during the
discussion about how we approach this work and the steps it takes. I find it interesting how many
political views show up about succession planning meetings that can cause some to be offended
or disagree. These views help us grow as we challenge one another's thought and help us work
through the biases and political views we may bring up. The organization has created chief
officer roles to hold ourselves accountable for a more inclusive and diverse company. The plan
laid out to be a more inclusive and diverse organization is symbolic. I come to this organization
as a diverse individual who struggled to see myself in a higher role than a store manager. Our
region had a leadership change that converted our senior leadership's mindsets to leaning on all
individuals for growth within the organization. I was leaned on and grew my career with this

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change. I find it symbolic that we now have many visible changes and publicly shared our
initiatives and goals to hold ourselves accountable. Finally, our organization prides itself as one
of the most ethical companies globally and has continued to hold ourselves responsible for our
goals and initiatives. As the one I am referencing, these meetings were meant to be tense and not
aligned as there is no such idea that can identify "what I & I&D looks like" in an organization
that strives to be diverse and inclusive. (Starbucks named one of the World’s Most Ethical
Companies, 2018). (Company Information, 2021)

2) Describe how the structure of the organization influenced the situation.

The organization's structure has changed because of our approach to inclusion and diversity
goals we have set out. These are not metric-driven goals, but the leaders and talent acquisition
team's behaviors on selecting, developing, and training the employees with an equitable
approach. The company went through a racial discrimination incident in April 2018 in the state
of Philadelphia. This incident had the organization under review about our practices and
approaches with racial bias. Starbucks created a continuous learning journey that helped break
racial bias and handle customers in our stores. After the organization reviewed our racial bias
training, the organization identified many gaps in our inclusive approach, limiting our teams'
diversity. The region I fall within realigned our markets with new regional and district managers
approaching staffing, training, and development. As a team, we decide together and challenge
each other's thoughts and perspectives about developing and selecting our talent.

3) Recommend how you would use structure for an alternative course of action
regarding your case.

Starbucks took an aggressive approach to mitigate racial bias training across all roles within
the organization and generalized the learning. The situation that I encountered in which bias
showed up on grading our employees on the interview sparked a back and forth debated amongst
our team. I find that situationally Starbucks should provide more specific bias training across all
areas of our work. For example, how we select, interview, develop, and training our staff.

The bias training would include how we remove filters that are unnecessary to the job an
individual is applying for and focus more on the individual's behaviors in the interview. I would
suggest we provide "today's reality" such as virtual interviews and virtual conversations and how
our biases may show how an employee shows up to an internal interview. For example, if an
employee conducts an internal interview in our backrooms of a store and the backroom's noise
and settings distracted the interview process. The bias showed up from the leaders assessing the
interviewer that they were professional enough with the environment and noise. This was
assumption and bias that got in the way of evaluating the candidate's behaviors that pertain to the
job. The biggest problem here is I know this particular candidate’s situation having no wifi at
home, and they had no computer to conduct this interview. These are biases that we create about

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someone interviewing for career growth within the organization and have unfortunate life
circumstances out of their control; these factors shouldn't be graded.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.

During this discussion with my team, I was frustrated and showed my emotions on why that
wasn’t okay. What I should've done is reflected in our development journey as the organization's
leaders to challenge their thoughts. I found that although we did bias training, many people took
it as only color or race. This was the most important topic to discuss. Still, there are other
important topics to discuss bias in an organization that has created a cyclical cycle within the
world and potentially our organization.

The additional steps I would take is I would ask the team not to move forward with the
assessment until we can "unpack" this area we are stuck in. This matter has now come up twice
since we discussed that in the initial dialogue. I wish I had stopped the team and focus on the
root cause of the bias they carried through the assessment conversation and worked through this
with my team. It was an uncomfortable conversation to have; we brought it up and avoided the
details because it would derail the meeting and prevent us from achieving our meeting's
objective. Since the matter showed up again in another conversation, it was clear that the team
was not aligned on how we assess our talent and work through our biases. If I had stopped the
conversation from being avoided and stayed focused on the bias showing up, we would've
moved through this situation with our team quickly. It wouldn't have shown up again in another
assessment conversation.

Works Cited
Company Information. (2021). Retrieved from Starbucks: https://www.starbucks.com/about-
us/company-information

Starbucks named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. (2018, February 12). Retrieved
from Starbucks Stories & News: https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2018/starbucks-
worlds-most-ethical-companies-2018/