Be the Manager You supervise a team of marketing analysts who work on different

Question

Be the Manager You supervise a team of marketing analysts who work on different snack products in a large food products company. The marketing analysts have recently received undergraduate degrees in business or liberal arts and have been on the job between one and three years. Their responsibilities include analyzing the market for their respective products, including competitors; tracking current marketing initiatives; and planning future marketing campaigns. They also need to prepare quarterly sales and expense reports for their products and estimated budgets for the next three quarters; to prepare these reports, they need to obtain data from financial and accounting analysts assigned to their products. When they first started on the job, you took each marketing analyst through the reporting cycle, explaining what needs to be done and how to accomplish it and emphasizing the need for timely reports. Although preparing the reports can be tedious, you think the task is pretty straightforward and easily accomplished if the analysts plan ahead and allocate sufficient time for it When reporting time approaches, you remind the analysts through e-mail messages and emphasize the need for accurate and timely reports in team meetings. You believe this element of the analysts' jobs couldn't be more stra·1ghtforward. However, at the end of each quarter, the majority of the analysts turn their reports in a day or two late, and, worse yet, your own supervisor (to whom the reports are eventually turned in) has indicated that information is often missing and sometimes the reports contain errors. Once you started getting flak from your supervisor about this problem, you decided you had better fix things quickly. You met with the marketing analysts, explained the problem, told them to turn the reports in to you a day or two early so you could look them over, and more generally emphasized that they really needed to get their act together. Unfortunately things have not improved much, and you are spending more and more of your own time doing the reports. What are you going to do?

Evaluate the case and propose a solution. Prioritise the steps to be taken in your approach, be systematic and motivate your assertions ?

Explanation / Answer

This is classical case, where we see that there is communication gap among sub ordinate and no proper direction is given to sub ordinates.

Looking closely at the case mentioned we observe following inputs:
1. Assumptions by Managers : Managers feels making report is straight forward job.
2. The market analyst doesn't have exposure to the work they are doing (less experience)
3. Communication channels are not their (inter department communication) as market analyst need to obtain data from financial and accounting.
4. No meeting with sub ordinate and no feedback channel.

The Action Plan
1. The manager needs to call his/her sub ordinates, and discuss on the possible reasons of delay.
2. One of the reason could be training. Manger needs to plan for the training of its people for their effective utilization.
3. Manager needs to revise or revisit the timelines and with the agreement of sub ordinate new timeline to be fixed for every quarter. Different check levels needs to be made to ensure correct data processing.
4. Manager need to involve with his team on Bi- weekly review and monthly interaction of team with other departments for clear communication and coordination, to get required data whenever required. he need to become bridge between different department.
5. Among the team, best employee need to be recognized and awarded for his motivation and for others to follow.
6. An informal meeting , discussion over cup of tea to understand the concern of the employee and to make work environment relaxed for better results to be made. A pressure situation is not good for results.
6. Manager needs to be proactive in his approach and lead by example.

I hope your question is addressed satisfactorily.

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