OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I: PCA-Ethical

Communities Worksheet
Worksheet Objectives:

1. Describe the four ethical communities

2. Apply the ethical communities 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 am a Starbucks Partner (employee) and have been for a little over a decade. I have been

a barista to a store manager and now my most current role is in the Global Supply Chain

diversion of the organization. Starbucks is known for how we treat our customers and partners,

putting them at the center of everything we do. I have been in the role a little over four months

and I am on what we call a time limited assignment, it is a six month long time frame. We are

still navigating the pandemic and Global Supply Chain is no different. My role was created in an

effort to support the store experience. Stores need visibility when their product will be arriving

and the internal team needs support getting the work done.

All great things, only issue. I have never worked in Global Supply Chain and have no

foundational knowledge to be helpful (at the time I started). There was no training, no structure

and no support to bring me up to speed, to actually do the job. The complexity came from not

being able to pull a team member from the peer team and the urgency to fill the role. I was

intrigued about Supply Chain and after a couple of interviews, landed the gig. However, I had no
idea what to do or where to start to be helpful. While I now have a solid understanding of my

role. It has been some of the hardest three months of my professional career. Training was an

afterthought and often done on the fly and at the expense of my peers having to take on more

responsibilities in an effort to support me. Starbucks has some amazing training plans, this was

not one of those cases.

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

This is in my opinion where Starbucks thrives. Of course we make mistakes but we own

them. It has been my experience that we have excellence, caring, justice, faith and belief as

foundations of our organization. As for my situation I would even say they are all present with

the intention but maybe not the execution of my role being created. Starting with excellence,

“Ensuring work is done as effectively and efficiently as possible to create high quality yields”

(Bolman & Deal, 2017, p. 392). As a team we make sure the work is done as quickly as possible

and continuous work on process improvement when the time and situation arises. The training

that I received did not lend itself to efficiency but we were able to make it happen. My peers

were able to teach me how to understand the why to what we do to be able to apply it to other

parts of my role. There was nothing that could have been done differently apart from having

training at the start of my role with a dedicated trainer. This would have allowed excellence to

build and ramp up.

Caring is at the core of everything we do as an organization. However, the mark was

missed when it came to supporting my experience as a partner. There was no real thought given

to how the rapid change would impact my ability to perform and ultimately support the team. I

was there to fill an immediate need. As people the team did not know me and the relationship
had not been established to have the love that is needed to navigate a new member through their

journey. Being remote made it difficult as well because we were isolated and there was no way to

build a team or do some shoulder to shoulder work in person that creates a bond between team

members.

Where I think my situation was influenced the most was a misuse of justice and power.

The executive leadership dictated that this role needed to be filled now and they did not matter

how it got done. This is a vast oversimplification of the situation and still shows that executive

leadership can leverage their power to make things happen. I think that since the leaders had

made demands other leaders felt the pressure to fill it with a body. Peers to my boss were

unwilling to support the role and left an imbalance of power. This was their first team and it

seemed like there was no equity between them.

The last of faith, for me, faith in the organization is why I have continued to stay and

push through the times of hardship and ambiguity. Starbucks is built on rituals and symbols that

are shared and passed on through the years. “When ritual and ceremony are authentic and

attuned, they fire the imagination, invoke insight and touch the heart” (Bolman & Deal, 2017, p.

396). The last part of touching the heart is why I think the role was created, to support the stores,

the reason we all have jobs. To be able to have clear and kind messaging that gave insight into

product delays and helped the store partners navigate through their days.

3) Recommend how you would apply one of the ethical communities for an

alternative course of action regarding your case.

If we had the ability to go back and do it all over again. Leaning into the last ethical

community of faith and belief to ground the decisions that were being made with the partner
experience at the center of the decisions that were being made. By thinking about the impact of

the store partners and my experience together there would have been a faster way to support the

stores. Carving a week or two to give me foundational background knowledge and the reasons

why we do things would have made me more passionate about the work and how to improve it.

Since we are such a symbolic organization from the customer and partner perspective it

would be natural to lean into this ethical community. It is in my opinion one of the things that we

do best. Using significance as a cornerstone of my learning, “ Significance is built through the

use of many expressive symbolic forms: rituals, ceremonies, stories and music” (Bolman & Deal,

2017, p. 396). Setting time aside, even with the need for urgency to give insight and background

would have helped so much to my engagement with the role and my ability to manage a virtual

world. Creating a bond and a confidant in my trainer, where we could share stories and have a

sense of community that is lacking when you are not in the corporate office.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have

learned about ethics.

Having the ability to reflect back and think about how things could have been done

differently, helps to eliminate mistakes moving forward. For this reason there is nothing that I

would change about how my situation was handled in the view of the ethical communities.

Everyone did the best that they could with the information they had at the moment. I think that

leaders could have leaned into a sense of excellence a little more, we know what good training

looks like for partners and the impact it can have when it is non-existent. Having a little more

structure around what they were looking for and why would have allowed leaders to be able to

communicate needs with ease and support the growth and support the stores.
 Knowing that training and setting a partner on the right track is pivotal to the continued

success of the company, we should have done a better job setting the team up to be impacted at a

quicker rate of speed. If there were a sliding scale within each of the four, I believe that we were

medium on all four of them. Where I think we have the ability and the desire to be high in each

one of them. This is a learning experience for all those involved. My leader learned what they

needed to do and advocated for differently. More importantly, I learned what I needed differently.

Within the four communities, I need to be successful and empowered. How to do better for the

next member that is going to the team in a couple months.

Reference

Bolman, L. G. & Deal, T. E. (2017). Reframing Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership

(6th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Jossey-Bass