Black & Decker – the Adp Initiative

Gustavo Cespedes H.

106077446

IMBA Student

Human Resources Management 1st Reflection Paper

“Black & Decker – The ADP Initiative”

1. Since arriving Singapore, Lancaster has formulated several opinions about the health of the Eastern Hemisphere organization. What are his concerns both now and for the future?

He found there was a major disparity in the management styles of people. Some managers had styles which emphasized employee empowerment towards decision making and independency, others were the old authoritarian school which focus on individual control of the manager above all the group’s decision with little-to-none from the group members.

Also, he was concerned about the low promotion ratio existing in the company at that time. This means Black & Decker was not developing talent in order to fulfill the company’s necessities towards new management positions, instead, they were recruiting a lot of people from the outside with no knowledge of the company nor the business model or culture they were developing at the company. There was a lot of people with a lot of time in the same job position with the same responsibilities and this could lead to labor force aging, turning into a high attrition ratio in some point in the future where all these people needed to retire.

Finally, Lancaster was as well worried about the performance evaluation system they used in Asia at that time. They were using MBO program, which was replaced several years ago in the America Region. This program focused on a one-on-one relationship between managers and employees and could be the cause of biased evaluations. All these reasons plus the feeling that the company could get bad HR Management reputation and that HR relationships could negatively impact Lancaster’s goals in the eastern hemisphere got him concerned about the present and future HR policies of the company.

1. What problems does Lancaster want ADP to address?

First, Lancaster aimed ADP to address the objectivity issues of MBO procedures. As MBO is based on a one-on-one relation between managers and employees, it was easy to get the system influenced by interpersonal relationships meaning that if an employee was friend with his boss he could get a nice review, on the other hand, in the manager-subordinate relationship was not in good shape, the employee could get bad reviews. Second, addressing the time gaps of manager supervisions. In order to perform a good and productive review, managers must be aware of their subordinates’ task, performance, mistakes and day-to-day relationships. Due to the characteristics of a senior level management position, this was hardly accomplished by managers on-duty. Last, the quality of the feedback provided by a manager to its subordinate could be the key for success for professional development or a career path. With MBO this quality was not as good as required because the managers were not aware enough about their subordinates’ roles and tasks in order to form an objective feedback or opinion.