Schoen case : the new personnel director

As the newly appointed Personnel and Industrial Relations Director, Clyde Schoen had a first major responsibility in selecting and training the staff. He was equally responsible of coordinating procedures in domains such as discipline and global rewards policy in order to ensure a minimal uniformity or least some consistency in the whole company.

When delivering the official announcement of this newly created position, the CEO stressed the advantages, at this stage of growth for the company, of a centralized personnel Department and insisted a lot to the directors and their subordinates for providing full assistance and cooperation to Mr. Schoen and his team.

Despite this, most responsible people in the line resisted and the expected cooperation was reduced to a minimum. For example, when they sent to Mr. Schoen new requirements for hiring a new employee, they simply omitted to join a detailed job description, which Mr. Schoen considered as an obvious move to allow the recruitment process to start. The result was the Personnel Department was not in a position to determine the required qualifications for the job and was consequently enticed to send potential applicants to the concerned department, not only for final selection but foremost for preliminary interviews.

Out of eight dismissals happening since Mr. Schoen began his job, only two had been managed in cooperation with his department. In other cases, they merely informed it about their actions with an eventual blunt explanation. Aware about the imperative cooperation with the directors, Clyde Schoen tried, without a sounding success, to be diplomatic with them, reminding that those questions must be dealt with his department.

Very recently, Mr. Schoen spent several weeks conceiving a development programme for the foremen and technicians, a need of which had been suggested by the CEO himself when hiring Schoen. The programme entailed courses during the last two hours of work every Monday for a time span of ten consecutive weeks. These courses should be focusing on the basic principles of managing people. In his directive addressed to both the supervisors and their superiors, Schoen was underlining the importance of this programme as well as the interest it revealed for the top management. In spite of these precautions, he only found nine out of thirty-eight foremen in the company when he entered the room.

Both puzzled and furious, Schoen decided that time for a confrontation with the line people had come. His opinion was to end up with this difficult situation as if his instructions were not being followed the risk was that his department would become useless. Consequently, handing out a copy of the memorandum about the training session, Schoen exposed his case to the CEO and asked him to intervene personally. To give more weight to his request, he stressed that either the CEO insisted by himself to obtain that the Personnel Department instructions would be respected or he had to accept his resignation with immediate effect.

Questions:

1. How do you analyze the context of this company thanks to the Scott matrix and elements at your disposal? Justify your answer.                       

2. What do you think about the behaviour of the different actors in the organization towards this new position? Try to imagine the main reasons for their respective stance, considering the observed consequences.

3. What is your opinion about Mr. Schoen's approach of the situation? Would you have done differently and why?     

4. You now replace Mr. Schoen who has left the firm with immediate effect. What would be your priorities during the trial period of 3 months?