My Experience With Organizations

The ‘organization’, in its broadest definition, is something with which all people interact with on a daily basis. For me specifically, these interactions can largely be broken down into three categories of employment, education, and extracurricular involvement. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the role of management in both the former — wherein I have seen the benefits of proper management and the pitfalls that arise from its absence—and the latter, wherein I’ve been tasked on multiple occasions to take on the role of a manager. 

In my experience with organizations, the time of the most significant change and instability is when management changes. For instance, this summer I was a grocery store clerk working part time hours to supplement my income while I took summer courses. While on a shift-to-shift basis I would have any number of immediate supervisors, all of us who worked on the front end reported to the same front-end manager, who I shall refer to as Bob. Bob alleviated a lot of the transaction costs of the business: he’d been working at the store for twenty-some odd years and knew all the ins and outs of company policy, and had fostered good relationships with many of our regular customers. Whenever a problem arose, one could quickly turn to Bob, and he’d see it taken care of by whomever was needed, freeing up front-end workers to focus on their specific job’s tasks (bagging, scanning, greeting, etc.). Bob also handled most of the office work: hiring, scheduling, even break time was all largely left at his discretion. 

  

However, about half way through the summer, Bob was fired, and it left a big gap in the overall functionality of the store. While there were other managers who were able to take on some of his tasks, no one was immediately hired to do his job in interim, leading to a lot of confusion. For instance, I was once given five days off in a row on accident, only to be informed that the schedule that had been printed was incorrect after getting a call from work asking why I hadn’t shown up. Most days were either drastically over or understaffed, and the shift managers were often scrambling to keep things from falling apart. The result was a complete lack of efficiency: sometimes we’d have double the workers we needed, sometimes we’d have checkout lines that became overwhelming.

A similar story happened in my first semester as an RA here on campus, where my boss left for a different position at UW Madison. This time, University Housing brought in an RD from another building as well as the Area Coordinator (the next level up the hierarchy), to step in and supervise my staff. However, this too lead to a lack of real, direct supervision, and allowed a large amount of my staff (myself included) to somewhat step off the gas pedal, so to speak. I suppose this surmounts to a sort of hold up from labor.  In both of these cases, the tumult of losing supervision lead to a problem with transaction costs, and increased inefficiency. 

I, myself, have also been a manager in a few situations. In my old Boy Scout troop, I was eventually tasked with running weekly meetings, serving as the highest position a scout could hold in the troop. Here, I was put into a system already in place, one that I had little power to change, so my job was mostly to cut transaction costs by serving as a connector: I could get information from the adult leaders to the scouts more effectively and was able to bounce around to various different patrols and serve as a stopgap when any one person was being overworked. This allowed meetings to run relatively smoothly, and certainly much more efficiently than if my position had not existed.

Currently, I am also serving as the President of my RSO. Part of my job description here is to set meeting agendas, in which I have very broad authority to include largely whatever I want. While I take input from members of the board, this means that company discourse (and therefore company policy) can, in a sense, be somewhat limited to an Overton window of my own selection, which eliminates a transactional problem of outlier belief structures having undue sway on a small board (smaller sample sizes allow for larger error). 

A good takeaway from my experiences with management is that having good, direct supervision is essential to keeping organizational operations running smoothly. However, it’s best to avoid a key man scenario, wherein if that person leaves, the house of cards crumbles. Having managerial positions overlap on duties, and delegating some responsibility to employees, while technically less efficient from a lack of specialization, allows for some durability when situations go awry.