Principle Agent Model
A situation where an agent deals with two different principles is usually very difficult if both parties are not open minded. In this type of “triangle” situation, it is important that there are channels of communication with every party involved; however, there are often situations where the agent can only satisfy one party.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of a triangle like arrangement that I have participated in is Illinois Business Consulting. Within this organization, I definitely experienced conflict due to having multiple managers on my consulting team and a client outside of the organization. In addition, I was able to witness various conflicts occur between the hierarchy of leaders in the entire organization.
My team consisted of multiple consultants, a senior consultant, a project manager, and a senior manager. It was nice that we all attended client meetings and phone calls, so there was open communication with everyone on my team and our client. However, our senior manager did not meet with our team as often as everyone else did. This caused her to not fully understand our ideas and work and how it all related to the client’s needs. The consultants, including myself, had a difficult time with this situation because it felt like we were changing all of our hard work to match the way that she envisioned it. This relates to the situation where the agent can only satisfy one party because ultimately our senior manager had the final say for our project. Although the client wasn’t necessarily upset about this, they definitely expressed changes they would like to make in the future. Our entire team, including my project manager, agreed that our original research and slide presentation was much more catered towards our client’s needs. Our team did not present the original slides that we created, but we did send it to the client as additional research for them to view during our presentation. This action was okay with our senior manager, so we were not disobeying or ignoring her by any means; however, after seeing the research, our client expressed that they wanted our work to be similar to what we sent them and not what we presented. In this scenario, our client could have been more satisfied with our original work, but we had to satisfy our manager instead of allowing both parties to feel content.
In addition, my team witnessed conflicts between my project manager and senior manager. This was a difficult situation because our senior manager had the final say on everything, but our project manager was the one who really ran the entire consulting project for the semester. As mentioned earlier, our senior manager did not really agree with some of the work our group was doing, so she actually had a few senior managers from different teams come to one of our team meetings and give their feedback. A couple of these senior managers seemed to understand the work we did; however, one of them gave a lot of criticism on all of our slides and all of our work. This person seemed to agree with my senior manager the most, and it seemed like my senior manager just wanted someone that would share the same opinion as her. After all of the senior managers left the room, my project manager expressed her differing opinion. She felt that they were too focused on criticizing the smaller details but failed to understand the overall purpose of our project. This situation was a “triangle scenario” in two different ways. Two managers had to compromise on how they wanted their consultants to work, but they also had to come to a consensus on how to please the client.
The first thing that comes to mind when I think of a triangle like arrangement that I have participated in is Illinois Business Consulting. Within this organization, I definitely experienced conflict due to having multiple managers on my consulting team and a client outside of the organization. In addition, I was able to witness various conflicts occur between the hierarchy of leaders in the entire organization.
My team consisted of multiple consultants, a senior consultant, a project manager, and a senior manager. It was nice that we all attended client meetings and phone calls, so there was open communication with everyone on my team and our client. However, our senior manager did not meet with our team as often as everyone else did. This caused her to not fully understand our ideas and work and how it all related to the client’s needs. The consultants, including myself, had a difficult time with this situation because it felt like we were changing all of our hard work to match the way that she envisioned it. This relates to the situation where the agent can only satisfy one party because ultimately our senior manager had the final say for our project. Although the client wasn’t necessarily upset about this, they definitely expressed changes they would like to make in the future. Our entire team, including my project manager, agreed that our original research and slide presentation was much more catered towards our client’s needs. Our team did not present the original slides that we created, but we did send it to the client as additional research for them to view during our presentation. This action was okay with our senior manager, so we were not disobeying or ignoring her by any means; however, after seeing the research, our client expressed that they wanted our work to be similar to what we sent them and not what we presented. In this scenario, our client could have been more satisfied with our original work, but we had to satisfy our manager instead of allowing both parties to feel content.
In addition, my team witnessed conflicts between my project manager and senior manager. This was a difficult situation because our senior manager had the final say on everything, but our project manager was the one who really ran the entire consulting project for the semester. As mentioned earlier, our senior manager did not really agree with some of the work our group was doing, so she actually had a few senior managers from different teams come to one of our team meetings and give their feedback. A couple of these senior managers seemed to understand the work we did; however, one of them gave a lot of criticism on all of our slides and all of our work. This person seemed to agree with my senior manager the most, and it seemed like my senior manager just wanted someone that would share the same opinion as her. After all of the senior managers left the room, my project manager expressed her differing opinion. She felt that they were too focused on criticizing the smaller details but failed to understand the overall purpose of our project. This situation was a “triangle scenario” in two different ways. Two managers had to compromise on how they wanted their consultants to work, but they also had to come to a consensus on how to please the client.
Related to comments on a prior post, I'm curious how managers get chosen for IBC and what training they have in the role. It's great to have this structure to simulate a real consulting firm, but student experience as a manager has to be limited. So some of these conflicts based on judgment sound like immaturity to me. I wonder if they are inevitable as a result.
ReplyDelete