Exercise #1:  The Disgruntled Analyst

 Relationship:  A supervisor and an employee who reports directly to him or her

 Context:  You are an employee who joined the company eighteen months ago as an entry-level analyst. You have a bachelor’s degree in finance and some prior work experience in sales.

 You had other job offers but accepted this one because you thought it would offer the greatest challenge and most opportunity for growth and advancement. Now you are no longer the most junior employee in the organization: others with similar education but less experience are assigned to your division.

 The Analyst: 

You feel that you are stuck doing all of the most basic grunt work in the division: gathering and organizing data sets that everyone uses, dealing with ground-level maintenance problems, and producing report documents that newer employees can claim credit for but contribute less to.

 The Supervisor:

 You think the analyst is doing acceptable work, but it’s far from top-level performance. During the past 30 days, you have had to counsel this individual twice about late “after market” reports and misrouted reports. You think this person might eventually make a good trader, but first must “grow up” and begin accepting responsibility on the job.

 Exercise #2:  The Imperiled Line Extension

 Relationship:  Two coworkers who report to different superiors.

 Context:  You and another employee who is about your age work in different divisions of a large packaged goods firm. You have been assigned to work on a product line extension together. Your target launch date is eight months from now. Needless to say, a considerable amount of time, effort, and money are being devoted to the success of this project.

Coworker #1:  You feel that your coworker (from another division) has simply not cooperated with you in gathering the information you’ll need to make your launch window. Unless you can secure the cooperation of this person, key issues, including packaging, transportation, advertising and promotion, and retailer incentives, may be in jeopardy. You have asked to meet with your coworkers to talk it over. 

Coworker #2:  You are supposed to be gathering information for your coworker in terms of packaging, transportation, advertising and promotion, and retailer incentives, however, the coworker is pretty rude about the deadlines and seems to be demanding. The deadlines that are given are unrealistic because you have other tasks that need to get done on another project. This is not the only project you’re working on. Besides, the coworker wants to always meet face to face and you don’t always have the time to meet that way.