Stella McCarthy Case

Stella McCarthy

In "What Am I Going to Do about Stella McCarthy, in incident 3 of Critical Incidents in Management, Jim Murray is the manager of the accounting department at Todd Brother Chevrolet. (Leffler, 1999) Jim has an employee who is having personal issues that are affecting her work. She has begun to abuse sick days and is missing critical suspense's. The following paper will discuss the issues of this situation, discuss and analyze alternatives, and develop an action plan for the situation.

In order to analyze the case data one must understand the issues that surround the incident. The issues in the case are that the Stella is missing suspense's and abusing sick days. Her poor work performance is affecting Todd Brother Chevrolet. She was unable to complete the task of closing last month's books. Not closing out the books on time will affect Todd Brother Chevrolet. Next, we will analyze the case data.

Let's analyze the case data of this incident. Stella's marriage is having falling apart, she is concerned about her children and her finances. She is abusing sick days and spending an enormous amount of time on personal phone calls. Stella's personal problems are causing her work performance to be affected. Jim, Stella's boss, has tried talking to her in an informal manner about what is going on. Jim reminded Stella about free counseling sessions that she could receive from the company's health plan and encouraged her to keep her spirits up.

This case involves an employee who is having personal issues that are affecting her work performance. As the manager Jim needs to find a better way to handle this situation. Jim talked to Stella in an informal sitting about it however, her work performance did not improve; in fact it declined even more. An alternative to handling this situation would have been to temporarily assign Stella different work that would have better suited her frame of mind. Another alternative that Jim could have taken would have been to be more direct with Stella regarding her work performance and focusing the discussion on her behaviors and performance expectations, not on her external problems.

When making decisions we know that certain criteria need to be met in order for the decision to be successful. In this incident, an alternative situation needs to allow for Todd Chevrolet to have completed closing last month's books out on time and have helped Stella in dealing with her personal problems. After understanding the criteria that needs to be met each alternative needs to to be analyzed and evaluated to decide the best possible outcome.

The first alternative to this situation would have been for Jim to to talk to Stella again after her missing three more sick days and been very specific about her performance expectations. Jim could have used a Model II approach with Stella. A Model II method is detailed, straight forward, and invokes discussion about tough, productive reasoning that results