NADYA SAFARINA - 29119063

MM6011-HUMAN CAPITAL (YP 61)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CASE STUDY 3: HOW TO PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS

During formal employee evaluations, discussion mostly focuses on how to improve employee‟s
weaknesses. In other words, most feedback given to the employee accentuates the negative rather than
the positive side. Multiple studies have shown that people pay keen attention to negative information
and even though traditional, corrective feedback has it place, unfortunately, feedback that ferrets out
flaws can lead otherwise talented managers to overinvest in shoring up or papering over their perceived
weaknesses or forcing themselves onto an ill-fitting template. Regarding this matter, researchers from
Gallup Organization suggested that to foster excellence in the third baseman by identifying and
harnessing his unique strengths. One of the tools to help people understand and leverage their
individual talents by developing a sense of their “personal best” in order to increase their future
potential that explained in this article is the Reflected Best Self (RBS) exercise.

RBS exercise can help you tap into unrecognized and unexplored areas of potential. Armed with a
constructive, systematic process for gathering and analyzing data about your best self, you can burnish
your performance at work. There are four steps in RBS exercise: 1) Identify Respondents and Ask
for Feedback. Collect feedback from a variety of people inside and outside work. By gathering input
from a variety of sources you can develop a much broader and richer understanding of yourself than
you can from a standard performance evaluation; 2) Recognize Patterns. Create a table to help you
understand the feedback you collect. By clustering examples, you can more easily compare responses
and identify common themes; 3) Compose Your Self-Portrait. Write a description of yourself that
summarizes and distills the accumulated information. The description should weave themes from the
feedback together with your self-observations into a composite of who you are at your best; 4) Re-
design Your Job. After pinpointed your strength, redesign your personal job description to build on
what you're good at.

Mapping your own strength is an essential matter, not only when you have already worked in a
company but also when you applied for a job in the company. One of the requirements to apply a job is
by having your resume ready with skills and strengths listed on it. Employers pay special attention to
the skill and strength section of your resume to determine if you should move on to the next step of the
hiring process, so you need to list the skills and strengths that set you apart from other candidates. By
having RBS exercise, you will know what your strengths are in a broader scope and also in a less
biased way because it involves other people to evaluate the strengths you have.
 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
CASE STUDY 4: GEN Y IN THE WORKFORCE

Josh Lewis, a young staffer at Rising Entertainment, is frustrated because his boss, marketing chief
Sarah Bennett, will not listen to his ideas about using new media to promote Fire Force Five films. Josh
thought Sarah still trapped in the 1990s because the marketing media Sarah used centered primarily on
traditional marketing channels such as TV ads and aggressive print campaign. Josh pointed out about
people nowadays do not watched network TV anymore and it will be better if they used new media by
having the song available for Guitar Hero, for example. Sarah immediately balked at Josh‟s idea,
noting the limited budget, the time, and also the availability of the resources. Josh, however, still hold
into the „new marketing‟ idea and tried to find another way so his idea can be acknowledged. Rather
than devote even more time to Sarah‟s assignment, Josh opted to turn in a “good enough” version then
he had raced off to legal and pitched his idea to the CEO in the hallway. The CEO loved it, but Sarah
was upset with Josh for going over her head and submitting subpar work on the presentation.

From this case, we can learn that clashes between impatient Generation Y and pay-your-dues
Generation X are inevitable. Gen X-ers and Millennials working closely together sometimes have
difficulty getting along. From the case above, both Sarah and Josh have their own opinion about
promoting the new film. In my opinion, to work together more effectively they need to communicate in
this issue. Sarah should reprimand Josh for bypassing her because as a young staff, he should respect
her authority and work with her, not around her. On the other hand, Sarah must address Josh's
frustrations because like Gen Y-ers in general, he wants to know that his work is meaningful, and he
needs constructive feedback on suggestions.

Besides the generation gap, the different values and the culture of the employee also can spark off
conflict in a working place. Every person has their way of working and each person inevitably has
different values or beliefs from what the company has. That being the case, an induction program is
necessary to put into practice. The induction program is the process used within many businesses to
welcome new employees to the company and prepare them for their new role. The main purpose of
induction training is to integrate new employees into the company and make them understand the
systems and procedures followed by the organization. By having induction training, not only they can
understand the culture of the company but also how we do things around here. It is including how we
should behave with our user and supervisor and “do”s and “don‟t”s in the company. Having clear
communication and be respectful are also other things. By possessing open-mind and understanding
ways of thinking, it can decrease the conflict caused by the generation gap and all the employees,
despite the differences they have, can achieve company goals successfully.