Judith Greene is the newly appointed vice president of administration of the International Division of the bank. She joined the division as a junior analyst years ago right after she graduated from Eastern College with a Bachelor of Science in Economics. She was subsequently promoted to senior analyst and area supervisor.
Judith Greene accepted the position as vice president of administration, choosing to have her office located within the bullpen area containing the area supervisors, analysts, and support staff. She initially focused on improving conditions among the junior staff with minimal threat to the vice presidents and senior vice presidents. Some of her steps in the first couple of years were:
Crackdown on inadequate clerical and support services: Remember that analysts, especially the women, were particularly angry with their poor service and lack of respect from the predominantly female support staff. No one seemed to have either the interest or authority to impose discipline. Judith attacked this area first by dismissing the poorest performers, issuing threats to others, and instituting a more equitable work-order system. She chose a hard line because she wanted rapid improvement to demonstrate her potential to help analysts and supervisors. Of course she warned Marshall Wilde that there might be some complaints from the bank's human resources department, but it was easy for him to fend off such flack. The risk in this initial step was quite modest because it benefitted junior staff immediately while not affecting the senior officers.
She just moved into a power vacuum with the executive vice president's acquiescence. Judith did, however, run the risk of appearing to validate a token stereotype that she was really just a glorified office manager responsible for the typing pool.
Redesign of the common room: Judith implemented a total redesign of the common room moving to an open office landscape with modular furniture grouping of interdependent people based on geo graphic responsibilities. Although the regional supervisors' private cubicles were eliminated, the overall climate of the room was significantly improved with everyone now able to see the windows and the potted palms. More important, noise level was reduced while work communications were facilitated. Plus the expenditure of funds to improve the office was a symbolic communication to the junior officers of their importance (and of her clout).
If one were starting from scratch to design the layout of the international department at Trustworthy, one would probably take the whole floor as one's canvas, moving the senior officers out of their isolated luxury into regional configurations among their supervisors and analysts. Judith, however, concluded that such precipitant action would be too threatening to the senior officers and might strain Marshall Wilde's support. Therefore, rather than drawing on her mentor's political capital, she merely asked for the money to improve the common room, again an action which did not directly affect the senior officers.
Representation and leadership of area supervisors: As we saw, the vice presidents and senior vice presidents were too busy with their banking functions to devote time and energy to managing the area supervisors. Traveling, negotiating, and swinging deals were simply more interesting to the senior officers. Judith was able to move into this vacuum and develop power vis-a-vis the area supervisors by representing their interests upward to the executive vice president.
Balancing analyst assignments: Working with the area supervisors, Judith was able to develop a more equitable system for allocating tasks to the analysts. Thus, the most favored or most promising were no longer unfairly overloaded and assignment turnaround improved. Again, for the most part this was at a level of detail below the senior officers' attention, although it eventually improved the service they received.
Coordinating recruiting, training, and performance reviews: These activities were additional neglected areas into which Judith was able to move by simply initiating action with her mentor's approval. Using her developing political capital with the area supervisors, she was able to assist them in providing more timely performance feedback to the analysts.
Job enrichment for area supervisors and senior analysts: This was the first initiative which directly threatened senior officers. We've seen that they tended to be loners so that the junior professionals had little sense of how their work assisted senior officers in their duties. Judith got Marshall Wilde to mandate that senior officers will take one supervisor or senior analyst with them on all their visits with clients. The positive impact on junior officer morale was dramatic because this brought them closer to the action. To be sure, some of the senior officers complained about "babysitting" and how angry their wives would be if they traveled with a female subordinate (the illusions that middle-aged men have about their attractiveness to young professional women are quite extraordinary!), but they really had no legitimate counter to Marshall's implementation of Judith's job enrichment policy.
What is striking about Judith Greene's approach was her clever movement into the power vacuum, picking up tasks that were not formally assigned, but which no senior officer was performing. And her approach was incremental, minimizing drawing on her mentor's political capital while utilizing his financial resources to promote their shared vision of offering greater challenges to analysts and supervisors.
Marshall Wilde was certainly pleased with her contributions to the department. After two years, he made Judith president of a wholly owned Trustworthy subsidiary (located in another city) of which he as the parent's international executive vice president was chairman. In assessing whether this was a career enhancing position, Judith had to judge whether it was a trip away from Trust worthy's power axis or whether it was a stage in an upward climb. Since six of the ten regional senior vice presidents and vice presidents had served as the subsidiary president, the appointment suggested that she was being groomed for a line banking post which was her ambition.
At the end of eighteen months as subsidiary president, she was pre-pared to return to any of the eight senior officer slots. And note that in moving to what is clearly the power axis, it would not be a demotion to return as the junior partner in a regional senior vice president-vice president pair (that is, her title would drop from president to vice president).
However, by this time Marshall Wilde had taken on the additional title of vice chairman of the bank with added responsibility for human resources and consumer banking, while still serving as international executive vice president. Judith was appointed senior vice president of administration with her office located next to the executive vice president (which was usually empty since Marshall worked out of his new vice chairman office). So it appeared that she might just bypass the regional vice presidency and move directly into the executive vice president position.
Judith's rapid movement was clearly fostered by her being Marshall Wilde's protégé. She was vulnerable, however, because of her identification with her sponsor. As fortune would have it, a leadership change at the top occurred and Marshall was forced out by a new chairman and president. The new leaders, however, recognized Judith's administrative skill and promoted her to international executive vice president. Still, Judith never felt quite comfortable with them and she rather quickly accepted the presidency of a smaller, regional competitor bank where she has done well.
Judith Greene was an effective protégé who was sensitive to her mentor's needs but still courageous in initiating positive actions based on his support.
Advice on Being a Protégé
- Reach out to prospective mentors by expressing interest in their activities and drawing attention to your work. It is of course dangerous to appear too "obvious," but you can strive to be in their presence, to send them written ideas for their comment, or to join off-work service and charitable organizations in which you can demonstrate your leadership capability.
- Do not look to one mentor to carry you through a whole career; be active in reaching out to other seniors so as not to be invisible in the light from your primary mentor-star. Recognize that no relationship is permanent and that some stress is normal as you mature and move toward greater independence.
- Don't be afraid (or ashamed) to reach out to senior others who might have been rivals or enemies of your initial mentor. Express an interest in their work and invite them to give you advice.
- In cross-gender relationships, recognize the risks of sexual and romantic involvement (and avoid it!), but don't be so wary and defensive that you are unwilling to accept their support. However, keep the relationship professional by avoiding pet names, physical contact, and excessive private meetings-especially outside the office.
- Even with a same-sex mentor, don't romanticize the relationship. You may admire the person greatly, but don't be blind to his or her faults. No matter how successful, your mentor is not perfect. You might want to keep personal notes on their strengths and weak-nesses.
- Recognize that all mentor-protégé relationships involve some "using" of the other person for personal gain. A mentor is never totally altruistic. He or she expects benefits from expressing an interest in your career, so your critical task is finding ways to help, perhaps even becoming indispensable.
