Acquaintance of the Vice President With His Team

Day one, priority number one as the new Vice President (VP) is devoting time and energy towards getting to know my position, my department and the directors of different departments. Most, if not everyone, will be wondering who I am, what my plans are, and what does this change of VP mean for them. With my department I will meet and establish how I expect them to perform and what I expect them to achieve.

Their first expectation is to become familiar with the other departments because each department is a piece of the puzzle, and when pieced together accurately, the completed product is a rewarding organization. This will allow each department to share how it performs and gain a sense of empathy for their work as well as the challenges they face. Understanding each of the different departments might help discover ways to work better, avoid duplicating work and streamline processes. By strengthening the influential networks between the different departments, employees will feel confident about their professional objectives and goals.

As a stranger to the department, my job is to figure out who is on the team, what’s what and who’s who. Identifying key positions and employees, without publicly identifying as such, will help determine whether the department is talent poor and key employee dependent, or talent rich and key employee independent. Performing one-on-one meetings with my employees will help gather the fundamentals of their job and importance. During these meetings I will review their past work, current works in progress, background materials, instructions, checklist as well as set-up a time to shadow the employee and watch them perform their job. These one-on-one meetings have exposed that Employees have become bored with their jobs because they are unable to develop their skills and challenge their knowledge.

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Employees of the Quality Control Department have low morale because they are unable to broaden their scope and feel their ambitions are being neglected. Implementing job rotations and teaching employees about the ecosystem of the workplace will help them become more involved in decision making, pitching ideas at meeting and building confidence to lead big projects. Employees have made it clear they want to be challenged, pushed and able to p their skill set. They will be placed in unfamiliar roles, presented new responsibilities all to allow them broaden their expertise.

Although time consuming, the frequency in which I will conduct one-on-ones will be a structured, repetitive event. Each employee will build a Individual Development Plan (IDP) at the time of their first one-on-one to share their goals and what they wish to accomplish in their career. Not every employee shares the same goals or has the same perspectives in regards to what they want to achieve in their career and others may be unsure. As stated in Personal Professional Development Plans, “To be successful in any career it’s imperative to set goals, make a plan and schedule a timeline to achieve them. This plan should be visual and tangible; one you can see and make changes to regularly” (Perry, 2017, p. 8).

This IDP will serve as a roadmap for each employee to include perceptible goals and a sane timeline for each of the goals. Once this IDP has been constructed I will assess and advise each employee to understand where they are, where they need to be and what they can realistically achieve. Month by month we will continue to meet to measure progress and provide constructive feedback to ensure the IDP is being used as a tool for growth and understanding.

Piecing employees with other departments in which their goal path relates towards will help introduce them to employees and directors who can serve as mentors. Sending them to training courses and workshops will forge highly driven and career focused employees as new learning experiences will help keep them engaged in their work. As we learned earlier, employees weren’t feeling the challenge they were seeking, which led to a feel of stand still in their career. Introducing team building exercises will foster connections, discussions, planning, problem solving and conflict resolutions.

A constructive team building exercise known as “Reflecting on the Day” is simply accomplished with just a ball made out of paper. This ball will be hurled from one employee to another in which they will reflect on what they learned from the involvement with another employee for that day. Team building brings employees closer by encouraging collaboration and teamwork in order to produce better productivity and results.

It will need to be made clear to the CEO that success will not be immediate and that he must be adaptive to change. As much as I’ve focused on teamwork and employees collaborating with one another there will be task conflicts along with personal conflicts which can be toxic. When employees grumble about another employee it creates a situation of having to arbitrate the dispute which stockpiles worthless time for the department. “Working together with others in a group poses important demands on individual group members. They have to cope with the challenges associated with the collective task and also with the ones involved by frequent interpersonal interactions” (Vırga, 2014, p. 3). The results of having a team compromised of employees who are unable to work productively in a team environment creates an emphasis of self-interest instead of wanting to collaborate with others.

The final goal as Vice President is to envision the future of Toyota’s Quality Control Department and convince the directors of the different departments that this vision is worth following. This vision will require long hours, great obstacles and alertness which is why each director should possess a high energy trait. A second trait to possess is intuitiveness, as there will be rapid changes, an overload of information and use of intuition. The final, but most important trait a director must posses is enthusiasm as they need to be active, expressive and energetic, but also optimistic and open to change. “Leaders must have purposes that are positive and productive and followers whose needs are met and satisfied and thus motivated to high levels of performance” (Jaffe-Ruiz, 2011). The possession of these traits will help motivate others and lead them in the direction that the vision is worth following.

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