After graduating from school, you are fortunate to receive anoffer as an assistant manager of a marketing department in acompany located in New York City, working for a fast-growingcompany that provides marketing support for companies. Yourdepartment specializes in marketing strategies for the Internet andcurrently has 10 employees – you, your direct supervisor (themanager of the department), and 8 marketing associates. Your job isto help the manager lead the unit to develop long-term strategiesfor your unit, to maintain excellent customer service with yourclients, and to strive to build future business opportunities. Themarketing associates in your department work a very flexibleschedule and are often off site, working with the clients at theirlocations to help develop marketing campaigns to improve theirbusiness presence and performance via the Internet.
After being on the job a short while, you realize that you needto create another position to help make sure that all the necessarywork gets completed on time. Essentially, while you and yourmanager are focusing on the long-term interests of the departmentand the associates are working very hard to help the clients, manyof the administrative aspects of the work are falling by thewayside. For example, no one is currently tracking the accountspayable from clients or handling accounts payable to your serviceproviders. As a result, you are spending time on these tasks thatare beyond your job expectations. In addition, you are spending anincreasing amount of time making travel arrangements, such asbooking hotels and arranging transportation for your staff. Afteryou talk with the manager of your unit, she agrees that somethingneeds to change to allow you to devote your time to more of thestrategic issues in the unit, and she permits you to create a newposition to help out in your department. Your challenge now is todetermine what this position will be.
a. What job wouldyou create? Why?
b. What are the keytasks and responsibilities that this new employee would be expectedto perform?
c. What are theemployee competencies this position needs to be successful?Why?
d. What are yourideas for how you might design performance management,compensation, and incentives for this new position? Why?
e. Are there anyparticular challenges you would expect to encounter that would makesuccessfully filling this position difficult? How would youovercome these challenges?
