Research and Essay Response to J. Lewis's time at Staples, Inc.

Essay Response - Staples Company

Throughout Jeanne Lewis' time at Staples, Inc. she made several career moves from area to area within the company. She began as a marketing manager, then became Director of New England Operations, Director of Sales for 150 stores on the east coast, and so on until she ended up as the Senior Vice President for Marketing in May, 1997. During all of these moves, Lewis had to work to craft the sort of team around her that she wanted to see, influencing the behavior of those around her so that they became the kinds of employees she wanted to work with and supervise. At one point early in her career, she fired several employees and then formed a whole new team, but in general she, as depicted in the case study, seems to want to stick with the people she has, forming them into the employees she wants through behavior influencing tactics and persuasion as well as behavior modeling and the communication of her expectations for her employees and subordinates.

One of Lewis' tactics for influencing behavior is to be seen in the way that she built a rapport with the individual workers she came into daily contact with. Throughout the case study, there is evidence of this. For example, she was happy for people to come into her office to share a piece of news or to tell a joke. People noted that her charm was a major part of her personality, and employees felt that she was someone for whom they could "go the extra mile" (Harvard Business School, 2000). Throughout Lewis' time at Staples, she seems to have gone out of her way to make employees feel valued. She sought out their input repeatedly, in the series of casual conversations she had with lower-level managers about what was going on in their departments, and made individual employees feel important and necessary when she made it clear that, in her first few weeks and months on her new job, she would be asking them a lot of questions and shadowing them. These types of actions send a strong message to employees that their jobs are functionally essential and that they are needed. By making employees feel this way, Lewis influenced them to be more likely to follow her directives and example as she sought to change the company culture and to implement her directives and vision for the marketing department (or, previously, for the other parts of the company in which she worked and supervised.) Using this tactic, Lewis also was able to improve morale and productivity, since employees felt that she was on their side, working just as hard as they were, and really interested in what they were doing every day. This tactic is definitely one that any manager could use to influence the behavior of those who work under him or her in a positive way.

Another of Lewis' ethical tactics for influencing behavior was working to build relationships across the company and get everyone to work together as a team. This came about when Lewis realized that the meetings she was having in which she got everyone together were not working very well-the most productive meetings she was having were taking place one on one. To combat this, Lewis set out to make team-building across the whole of her domain within the company a priority. Lewis made it clear to many of the other employees that the ethos under her command would be one of everyone working together. She made it clear that she wanted and needed the support of those under her direct supervision in order to lead effectively. This tactic was effective because it became clear to those working under Lewis that in order to best work with her they needed to work well with each other, and to communicate clearly and effectively with each other even when she was not directly involved. This was her goal in the first place, and thus this technique was extremely useful.

Early in her career, Lewis either did not have the confidence or did not have the latitude to pursue these avenues of changing the behavior of her subordinates and coworkers until she had the kind of team she wanted. Instead, in her first stint in Operations, Lewis had to fire 25 store associates within a year and replace them. With this new team, she was then, one assumes, able to build the kind of relationships just discussed, which one sees later on in her work in the company, and to do so successfully, because in just one year she moved on to manage a hundred and fifty stores in a large region of the country.

Now that she has more latitude to work with people if she chooses to, rather than to replace them quickly and be forced to wipe the slate clean, Lewis at the end of the case study seems to have made the decision to work with the people she has in place, although it is clear from the end of the case study that not all of the people she has working with her have earned her trust and confidence yet. However, Lewis had clearly worked to make the people she is now working with fit into her scheme of how her department should run. She has tried to develop individual rapport with them by making herself as accessible as possible and cultivating an open door policy. She has made herself familiar with what each employee does, making sure that they feel she understands their unique roles and what they bring to the table. She has also shared with them her philosophy of team building and open communication between and among the groups within the company, and has watched to see how they respond. Those who respond well, and seem to understand what she is going for, rather than clinging to the company's old ethos of competition and a lack of communication, seem to earn her trust, whereas she is not yet sure that others are good fits for her system.

Ultimately, Lewis uses various ethical tactics to mold the people she is working with into the kind of team she wants. Once she has made the decision to work with the people she has rather than forming a new team, it is clear that she works to get to know individuals and make them feel important, as well as to build an ethos of teamwork and communication between and among groups and individuals throughout the areas she supervises. She seems to have a positive managerial style that strives to take into account and to notice the contribution of each person to the team effort, and she personally tries to get to know each person with whom she works. The tactics she uses are certainly ethical and are, indeed, to be emulated by other business leaders and managers. Although the case study does not go so far as to discuss what happens after she takes the reins in the marketing department fully, there is every reason for a reader to think that the strategies that she uses will be successful in both the short and long term at Staples, Inc.