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CASE STUDY

Roy Richardson & Carol 2:

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Institute of Training & Occupational Learning ©20 11 3: CASE STUDY - Roy Richardson & Carol

Roy Richardson, ambitious, hard-working and dedicated, wakes at 7.45 a.m. and breakfasts on black coffee, which he needs to jolt him awake after a restless night.

He is slightly late for work and becomes more and more irritable as he negotiated rush-hour traffic during the hour-long drive into the office. Roy finds it difficult to get going in the morning, and he isn’t really awake until about 11 a.m. Carol, his secretary, greets him cheerfully but with circumspection. She is a bright young woman in her middle twenties. Carol always treats Roy with kid gloves in the mornings; she knows that his irritability wears off towards lunchtime.

On Monday mornings she has to be particularly patient and diplomatic.

Roy’s desk is strewn with papers. As usual, the sight of it depresses him. He looks around the room, irritated by the lack of space. The desk is slightly too low for his gangly frame so that he can never quite get the chair close enough to enable him to sit up straight. To combat this, Roy has developed the habit of conducting most of his business standing up. Being literally ‘on his toes’ makes him feel like the ‘quick-fire’ executive, poised to shoot from the hip, tensed and ready for any crisis (and there are many) that should come his way.

Roy has a talent for dictation (he is one of those rare people who can organise their thoughts aloud), and he has developed the habit of dictating as many as thirty or forty letters in a morning. Indeed, because he is repeatedly interrupted by the telephone it takes him all morning to get through his correspondence. Carol, for all her sterling patience, finds it difficult to type this many letters during the course of her day, particularly because she is continually interrupted by Roy in the afternoons. Roy has got into the habit of leaving

Institute of Training & Occupational Learning ©20 11 4:

Carol to sign most of his letters on his behalf. He doesn’t realise that some of his letters do not actually leave the office until several days after he has dictated them.

Roy has a sense that he works very fast. He fires off instructions to Carol throughout the day, and he can flash from one topic to another. The crises that others bring to him really get his adrenaline going. (The current crisis is that shipments out of the warehouse are being delayed because the company has recently undergone a merger and orders seem to have gone missing during the transfer of records from one computer to another.) Roy cannot believe some of the things he has to sort out.

He eats lunch, a sandwich, standing at his desk.

As a manager, Roy identifies closely with his job, the more so because his personal life has become more and more bleak as he spends so much time working. He often wakes at 3 a.m. worrying about the US sales figures. He always takes work home at the weekend and now, in fact, he finds that if he doesn’t have work to do time hangs heavy on his hands. Privately, Carol, who is perceptive as well as patient, thinks that the reason Roy is so irritable on Mondays is because the weekend has given him a little space to wonder what he is doing with his life, an occupation that he finds extremely threatening. Carol is right. Now, when the telephone rings and it is a friend asking him to spend a weekend in the country, Roy declines because he has too much to catch up on.

Roy’s experience of his work is that he is almost always being forced to be responsive rather than initiating. His working life is like one of those juggling acts in which plates are spun on poles and the juggler has to rush from one to another to spin them again as they start to slow and wobble. At the back of his mind Roy is haunted by the fear that one day all his plates will come crashing to the ground.

But each night he leaves the office at about 7 p.m. without the faintest idea whether he is happy with the day’s work or with life in general.

Carol, on the other hand, knows she is dissatisfied with spending her working life soothing and picking up after Roy. She feels a little sorry for him, especially since his girlfriend left him, but she is not his mother!

Institute of Training & Occupational Learning ©20 11 5: EXERCISES

1.) Using your intuition, what do you perceive as the root issues that Roy and Carol face?

ROY CAROL Institute of Training & Occupational Learning ©20 11 2.) Think of yourself as the Coach. Would you find it more difficult to build rapport with Roy or Carol? Why? What do you need to be aware of yourself in order to maintain rapport? Institute of Training & Occupational Learning ©20 11 3.) Choose either Roy or Carol. What models do you think you might call on for your overall coaching approach and specifically what goal setting model would you use? (don’t forget the extra models in the Audio Sessions!)

Postal Address

Well Done!

You’ve Finished It.

Institute of Training & Occupational Learning ©20 11 9: You now have some options, you need to send this back to me so that I can mark it.

1. As I explained in the Audio Session this is a writable document – if you have taken this option simply save the document to your PC and then e-mail it to me as an attachment to [email protected]

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