OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Political Frame Worksheet

Complete the following making sure to support your ideas and cite from the textbook and other
course materials per APA guidelines. After the peer review, you have a chance to update this and
format for your Electronic Portfolio due in Module 6.

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

After almost a year of working at my current Starbucks location and struggling through
inconsistent and unfair management, our manager was removed and replaced with a manager
from another location. We went from an extremely toxic environment rife with cliques, gossip,
and disdain for the job to a united group that was inspired to utilize standards to create the best
financial and customer experience results the store had ever seen. This period of transition was a
great example of pushing through changing an organization’s culture to create a better
environment and improve the business. The previous manager was more concerned with being
friends with employees than actually upholding standards or holding people accountable, so
there was a huge amount of tension and resistance when the new manager came in. However, the
new manager took the time to work shoulder to shoulder with her employees for two months,
getting to know them as people first, and seeing what they were used to in their routines. She
began giving people warnings that she would soon be starting to hold everyone accountable to
standards, and gave them sufficient time to get accustomed to the idea and start transitioning to a
new way of doing things. By the time she was writing people up and cracking down on the rules,
everyone liked (or at least respected) her and she turned our store statistics around to be the top
drive through in the area in less than six months.

I was a shift supervisor during this time and I was responsible for running individual
shifts and breaks, coaching and training baristas, and inventory management, as well as more
managerial tasks related to my development like training and coaching other supervisors and
managing team communications.

2) Describe how the politics of the organization influenced the situation.

The politics of Starbucks as a whole are too broad to have directly affected this situation;
the focus belongs on the politics of our district. It is the responsibility of our district manager to
hold store managers to a certain standard and protect employees in certain situations where the

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manager is not fulfilling their responsibilities. However, this also means that she has the power to
keep someone in a position even if they are not fulfilling those responsibilities. For example, she
had a good relationship with the first manager, and I think she didn’t want to cause social
problems by removing the manager as soon as she started showing signs of failure in the role.
When she eventually did, there was a bit of an uproar at my location because most of the
employees there really loved that manager and didn’t want any change. I myself liked her as a
person, but I knew that she was not the right manager for that store and couldn’t use politics to
drive her own success.

The new manager that came in understood the politics of our district and the structure of
Starbucks stores; she knew she had to learn the political state of the store before trying to change
it, and she started by finding out who were the most powerful members of the team and how to
either get them on her side or get them out of the way (without upsetting everyone else). In any
Starbucks location, if the entire team dislikes the manager or doesn’t accept their leadership,
while they may not have the power to actually remove them from the store, they can and will
turn against them and act as a coalition in the sense that they will refuse to do what the manager
asks of them, exclude the manager from any and all social interactions at work, turn new
employees against them, and even report them to the district manager or corporate level HR. The
new manager was able to avoid this by getting in with the coalition of powerful team members
before trying to make any sweeping change or statements.

Once she had gotten the key players on her side, she made it clear that she was the
captain of the ship and that she would be taking strong action to steer us in the right direction.
However, she also made sure that she remained accessible to each and every employee when
they needed something, and always made time to have conversations with them. The key thing
that she did right apart from remaining accessible is that she proved she was listening by
immediately taking action on employee concerns. She expanded her power base by having
weekly meetings with all of the shift supervisors, getting all of us on the same page and ensuring
that we were all approaching baristas with the same vision and goals, as well as holding them
accountable in an equal way across the board.

3) Recommend how you would use organizational politics for an alternative course of
action regarding your case.

If I had been in the position of my first manager, where everyone seems to naturally like
me and I have strong interpersonal and relationship-building skills, I would use this to my
advantage to foster change and create a better store environment that strives for success. I think
that being liked can lead to some of the strongest power in business, and I would have used my
political influence to change the way my employees viewed the store, each other and the job
itself.

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 Something I did to assist my new manager during the transition in helping to build a
better store that achieved greater results was use two different styles of influence tactics to
improve cleanliness and adherence to standards in our store. In chapter 9 of Reframing
Organizations, the authors list both “commitment and consistency” and “social proof” as
“techniques that skilled practitioners use to influence others, often without the targets realizing
how they have been hooked” (Chapter 9, Bolman & Deal, 2021). When discussing standard
practices and standards of cleanliness, I first explained the “why” behind any changes I was
trying to make, and then opted to begin with one small step, such as standardizing one station at
a time in the store and focusing on just that. This enabled many of the other supervisors to see
the benefits in changing to doing things “my way” (read: the official Starbucks way). Then, since
I didn’t have very much social influence at the time, and that was many baristas’ main influence
point, I was able to utilize “social proof” that the popular supervisors and popular baristas were
doing the right thing and influence the other baristas to slowly start adapting to the change.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently given what you have learned
about this frame.

In general, I struggle with the political aspect of business because I tend to separate my
work from my personality to the point where the people I work with don’t really know who I am,
or at least it takes a while to get to know me. It has taken me a long time to even start accepting
that politics are unavoidable in pretty much every situation, and I need to start figuring out how I
fit into that business frame and how I can make it work to my advantage. I learned a lot from my
current manager about how to avoid political conflict.

However, there was one thing I did that she didn’t do that I believe helped me on my
journey of personal and professional development, as well as improving my political leadership
skill set. “Agreement and harmony are easier to achieve when everyone shares similar values,
beliefs, and cultural ways. Very often, that’s not the case” (Chapter 9, Bolman & Deal, 2021).
This wasn’t the case when my new manager started and it is still not the case now. Another
political approach to this situation, that I actually took during this time of transition, was to
figure out what was most important to each of my peers (the other supervisors). This allowed me
to prioritize their values not only when we worked together, but also when I knew I would be
handing off to them next. For example, I would prioritize cleaning during my shift if I knew that
that was the most important thing to the next supervisor coming in, even if that meant putting off
inventory, because aligning my values with theirs improved our relationship, our handoffs, and
our ability to communicate about issues in the future. It gave me a jumping off point if there was
ever a problem to discuss, because they felt understood by me and I appreciated their point of
view.

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 Reference

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. “Chapter 9 Power, Conflict and Coalition.” Reframing

Organizations: Artistry, Choice, and Leadership, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, NJ,

2021.