Reputation

When I was a high school student, I had a strong reputation among my English teachers.  This was mostly because I was close to three of them in one year; one was my senior AP Literature teacher, one was my cross country coach, and one was my junior AP Language teacher who I was a teacher aid for senior year.  Since all of the English teachers at my school seemed to be friends, they talked to each other often about many things, including the students.  Over the years, I got to know my English teachers well and liked all of them.  I enjoyed talking to them and listening to what they had to say.

I admired my English teachers for their writing skills, strong opinions, love of news, and dedication to social justice.  They liked me for my strong work ethic and desire to learn.  They often told me I was a talented writer, and even shared some of my works with the class as examples.  My love for them and their belief in me drove me to constantly work hard to impress them.  

After three years spent around English teachers who cared for me and an English teacher/Cross Country coach who knew about my work ethic in and out of the classroom, I developed a reputation as a great student.  With each new assignment, I spent hours researching for essays and revising previous versions.  The fact that I had a “reputation” help my work and reputation grow stronger - I felt the need to keep up the high standard my English teachers had set for me.  I valued them and their opinions so much; if I slacked, what would they think?  

My reputation also expanded because I came to office hours whenever my English teachers had them.  I would ask them to look over my paper with my and make adjustments or correct errors.  I occasionally went in after school or during lunch to ask questions about how to make my writing better.  During my senior year, when it came time to write college application essays, I made sure at least one of them looked my work over before I sent it in.

At the end of my senior year, however, it got hard for me to focus on my schoolwork and thus harder to write good essays.  I still completed all of my assignments, but sometimes I shirked a bit on the essays I had to write for my senior class.  I think the teacher understood that most seniors were doing this, so it wasn’t a big deal.  Even so, the reputation I had developed over the years gave me a lot of leeway in terms of finishing those last assignments.  My senior year English teacher had a system of extra credit in which we could turn in weekly essays to increase our course grade.  Throughout the semester, I had turned in an essay almost every single week.  When it came time for the final paper, I had a 120% in the class.  This meant I could get a low B on our final essay and still have a solid A in the course.  

With such strong incentive to shirk (as it was the end of Senior year when lots of fun parties were happening and people were ready to move on to college), I did not work as hard on my final paper.  I received an A-, which I think was quite generous considering the amount of work I put in.  I think that my teacher understood how hard I had worked all through high school and how I decided it was time for a break.  I still tried, but I didn’t put forth a 100% effort.  This was my way of cashing in my reputation at the end of high school to allow me to slack on the final paper but still get a good grade in the class.

Triangular Principal-Agent Model

    In my job as a Resident Advisor (RA) on campus, I serve as an agent for both my boss (the Resident Director) and the residents who live in my wing of the building.    These two principals do not differ entirely on what it means to be a successful RA, but there are several important differences.

    The Resident Director (RD) is a professional housing staff member (often a graduate student or young professional in student affairs) who is in charge of the entire residence hall.  As my boss, the RD of my hall requires me to make educational bulletin boards once a month, create “Door Dec” artistic nametags for each of my 45 residents, and hang up flyers for different events put on by University Housing.  I am also required to plan educational and fun programs for the residents of my wing and for the whole building, go on rounds of the building to help ensure safety in the hall, and fill out paperwork to document any alcohol, drug-related, or bias/intolerance incidents that happen.  I attend weekly staff development meetings, create program lesson plans, and hold extra programs once a month pertaining to aspects of student wellness (health and fitness, stress management, self-reflection, etc.).

    On top of all these measureable and objective tasks, my RD also expects me to build community and develop relationships with each one of my residents.  I am required to hold “open door hours” at least five hours per week for residents to stop by and chat or ask questions.  Though these actions are encouraged, the RD essentially has no way to tell if these events are happening, so it is not formally measured in success from an RD’s standpoint.

    Doing all this is what counts as success in the eyes of my RD.  Residents, on the other hand, would see their RA as a success for different reasons.  It must be noted that a lot of what the RD uses to measure success is insignificant to the residents.  Most residents will not look at the bulletin boards I put up or come to the educational programs. Usually, just two or three residents from my wing come to an educational program; maybe ten residents come if the program is meant for the whole building.  Residents don’t generally care about whether their RA is going on rounds of the building.  In general, they don’t care as much about the technical parts of the job; residents just want an RA who is friendly, caring, and helpful.  Residents have come to me with ideas for programs that they think would be fun.  They have asked for tips on how to find a campus job, study more effectively, and make friends.  They have come to me to sort out roommate disagreements and occasionally knocked on my door in the earliest hours of the morning to talk about life struggles. To residents, a successful RA is one who shows care for each and every one of his/her residents.  It’s one who plans fun events, helps floormates become friends, and lends a listening ear.  It’s also one who is there to help when a resident gets locked out of his/her room or when neighbors are being too noisy.  

    Ideally, my Resident Director also considers these qualities as part of a successful RA.  The problem is that the qualities that residents tend to look for in an RA are hard to measure.  There is no way for an RD to know how many times an RA has interacted with each resident or how friendly he/she is on a day-to-day basis.  My Resident Director is in charge of me and my fellow RAs, but she’s also responsible for all nearly 500 residents who live in the building.  This makes her extremely busy.  So, realistically, it’s impossible for her to attempt to measure these intangible assets of successful RAs.  

    This causes a dilemma for the RA as an agent of the RD and of the residents. Evidently, the most important part of the job is supporting residents - that is what RAs are there for.  The difficulty of measuring this facet of the job encourages emphasis on less important parts of the job (bulletin boards, program planning, paperwork, etc.)  

    It is nearly impossible to be successful at both the measurable and immeasurable aspects of the RA job.  Most importantly, the RA should be successful for the residents. But this doesn’t always happen because the residents are not as demanding as the Resident Director; the resident director checks up on you and makes sure you are completing requirements, but residents don’t ask anything of you unless they’re having a specific problem.  Coming up with creative bulletin board ideas, hanging up flyers, and attending weekly staff development meetings takes away from my time with residents.  My job comes second to my position as a full-time student, so I have only limited time to begin with.  As a result, it’s easy to push the community-building aspects of the job to the back burner.

There multiple potential ways to solve this problem.  The first is to do only what the RD says, taking care of the measurable aspects of the job while ignoring the others.  This would make my look good in my boss’s eyes, but I wouldn’t be very connected to the residents.  Basically this method would make me a bad RA who looks like a good one.  Pleasing the RD principal does not often do much to help me be a successful RA for my residents.  In this case, pleasing one master would leave me failing for the other.

    The opposite extreme would be to skimp on the formal duties given to me by my RD to maximize my time with residents.  In this solution, I do just enough of what my RD says for her to see me as successful, and I dedicate most of my energy to the residents.  This, in my view, is the best solution because it allows both masters to be satisfied to some extent.

    Disregarding the requirements of the RD to focus only on the residents would not work because I would very likely lose my job that way.  It must also be mentioned that although they are less important than interacting with residents, the duties that my RD gives to me do contribute to my success with residents.  

    The only other option I see would be to sacrifice my learning or my personal well-being in order to be a “perfect” RA.  I could complete all the requirements that my RD gives me and be there constantly for all 45 of my residents, but I would have to give up sleep, study time, and exercise in order to do so.  At the beginning of the year, I tried this method and it ended up backfiring - I could not be a successful RA without getting enough sleep or feeling like I had put enough effort into my studies.  

    Though it is not ideal in some ways, doing the bare minimum of requirements from my RD and spending as much time as I can with residents seems to be the optimal solution.  I must complete the checklist of measurable requirements to satisfy one principal (the RD), and I must build community and form bonds with my residents to satisfy the other.  The two principals are not directly opposed, as pleasing one often helps in pleasing the other, but there are important differences which must be accounted for.

   

The Office Clarification Post

Here is some background about the main characters in the episode I described earlier:

1. Michael

Michael is the manager of the office.  He's goofy, blunt, and often rude (but he doesn't seem to realize it).   In this episode, he decides to mediate and solve as many workplace conflicts that he can. It is normally not his job to do this; he takes over for the HR manager, Toby (a minor character in the episode, so I didn't include his picture).

2. Oscar

Oscar is one of the accountants in the office.  He is upset the his co-worker Angela has an offensive poster hung on her wall that he can see every day.  He finds the poster creepy and doesn't want to look at it.






3. Angela

Angela is pretty much known around the office as an angry cat-lady.  She's the one who is in conflict with Oscar about the poster.  She wants to keep it because it was a gift and she thinks that it is great art.







The conflict:

Oscar is mad that Angela has an offensive poster on her wall.  He was just trying to tell the HR manager how he felt about it when Michael ("World's Best Boss") walked in and asked what the problem was.

Michael goes overboard and uses his "Mediator's Guide Book" to help Oscar and Angela solve their conflict.  He doesn't listen to Oscar nor Angela's real feelings as he goes about solving the problem.  

Keep in mind that Oscar's feelings about the poster would not have been a conflict if Michael hadn't decided to step in and tell Angela all about it.  So there was never really a conflict at all.  Oscar was just venting his feelings when Michael decided to make it into a full-on conflict between Oscar and Angela.



Below is the original blog post cleaned up.  It should hopefully be easier to understand now that it's been simplified a bit and now that you've been more formally introduced to the characters:

In Season 2 of The Office, Michael decides to manage conflict between office members.  It starts when he walks in on Oscar privately explaining his feelings about Angela’s offensive poster.  He’s really just venting his feelings to the office's HR manager, but Michael decides that it is an important conflict that needs to be addressed out in the open.  

 

He gets Angela and Oscar together in the conference room to discuss the issue face-to-face and takes  out his “Mediator’s Tool Chest.”  The "Mediators Tool Chest" is a book of Michael's which describes different styles of conflict resolution. He begins to read aloud from the tool chest to educate Angela and Oscar on the “5 styles of conflict.”  

 

Both Oscar and Angela seem eager to leave, forget about the conflict, and get back to their work.  Despite this, Michael explains each painstakingly-obvious definition from the tool chest in order, starting with Lose-Lose.  “A Lose-Lose situation is when both parties lose.  This is the most ineffective style…” he says.  “Now I have to ask you, do you want to pursue a lose-lose situation?” According to the book, the best scenario is the win-win-win, a situation in which both Angela and Oscar are happy with the outcome, and Michael “wins” for having successfully mediated a conflict in the workplace.

 

Angela and Oscar are in a fight over an “offensive” poster on Angela’s desk.  Michael walks them both over to the poster and asks each of them to express their feelings using “I statements” and “emotion statements”.  Angela states that she got the poster as a gift, appreciates its artistic value, and wants to see it every day.  Oscar finds the poster rude, offensive, and creepy.  He doesn’t want to have to look at it, and he does not think that it’s real art.  

 

Next, Michael decides that they should all “brainstorm creative alternatives” to find a win-win-win solution.  He immediately comes up with the idea that Angela makes the poster into a t-shirt for Oscar to wear every day.  That way, he can never see it, but Angela gets to see it every time she looks at Oscar.  Michael is happy because the way he sees it, both of them are winning in this scenario, and he came up with the solution himself (so he wins too).  

 

When neither Oscar nor Angela can come up with a better solution, Michael's assistant suggests that Angela gets to hang the poster on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  According to Michael, however, that would be classified as solution number 3 known as compromise, which is “not ideal.”  Michael ranks every solution to the problem which he thinks is possible:

3. Compromise: Angela gets to hang the poster on Tuesdays and Thursdays

2. Win-lose: Take the poster down so Oscar won’t have to look at something he finds  

offensive

1. Win-win-win: Have Oscar wear a t-shirt of the poster

According to Michael’s manual, a win-win-win situation is always best, so he makes the executive decision that Angela should make the t-shirt.  Michael’s view of the situation is selfish, apathetic, and hastily made.  If anything, he has made the problem worse instead of making it a “win-win-win situation.”    

 

He listens to Angela and Oscar’s sides of the situation, but he takes them too literally.  As a result, he comes up with a solution that makes them both worse off.  Angela has to take down her poster, and Oscar has to wear a t-shirt displaying a poster he finds offensive.  Essentially, Michael takes the conflict-resolution manual too seriously.  He loses sight of the real issue, which is about Angela and Oscar’s feelings, only to come up with a solution that can technically be classified as win-win-win.  

 

If Michael could look closely, however, he would see that it is more like a lose-lose-lose solution.  Angela is left unhappy, Oscar is left unhappy, and Michael hasn’t “resolved” anything.  Angela and Oscar let Michael charge ahead with his solution by reluctantly agreeing to do what he said.  

 

The show moved on, and the conflict was never truly resolved.  The most ironic thing of all is that if Michael hadn’t decided to step in in the first place, Oscar would have just finished venting to Toby about the problem and moved on. 

 

Michael’s idea that “bringing conflict out into the open” can solve problems causes further problems throughout the episode.  Michael asks to see written records of all the complaints people have every made to the HR manager about problems they’ve had with others in the workplace. The HR manager refuses, saying that it would infringe on everyone’s privacy, but Michael proceeds to snatch it out of his hands.  “I had to use win-lose that time,” Michael says, “It isn’t pretty.”   

 

He decides to sort out his newly acquired pile of workplace conflicts by reading them out loud to everyone.  He says that since the HR manager merely listened to everyone’s problems then waited for them to forget about it, he hates to see such angry feelings festering in the workplace; he decided they must be let out into the open.  Michael effectively makes everyone angry with each other for bringing up old dirt (most of the complaints were marked “redacted”, meaning that the complainer decided to remove the complaint anyway).  

 

Every single conflict in the episode could have been avoided if Michael had decided to just mind his own business.  Sometimes, bringing conflict out into the open (through a “cage match” to put it in Michael’s words) does more harm than good.  One lesson I’ve learned from this episode is to keep any complaints about others to myself.  The most important one, however, is that listening to people’s problems rather than jumping to a solution is essential.  

I hope this makes the story easier to understand; sorry that it wasn't clear enough the first time.  Please let me know if this is understandable now.

 

Workplace Conflict

In Season 2 of The Office, Michael takes over Toby’s job of HR manager to manage conflict between office members.  It starts when he hears Oscar yelling about Angela’s offensive poster.  He’s really just venting his feelings to Toby, but Michael decides that it is an important issue that needs to be addressed.  

At first, he tries to get Oscar to dismiss the problem, saying “So what, you’ve having a little spat.  I forget, aren’t you two dating?” Michael’s initial response to this issue is problematic for many reasons.  He invalidates Oscar’s feelings when he says that the problem is just a “little spat.”  He then goes on to probably offend Oscar when he asks if the two are dating - Oscar is openly gay.  

Once Toby convinces Michael that his response to the situation was not ideal, Michael decides to give conflict resolution a try.  He gets Angela and Oscar together in the conference room to discuss the issue face-to-face and takes  out his “Mediator’s Tool Chest.”  He begins to read aloud from the tool chest to educate Angela and Oscar on the “5 styles of conflict.”  Angela immediately asks to leave, “because I have lots of work to do”, and Oscar asks to get the process over-with as well.  Despite their complaints, Michael explains each painstakingly-obvious definition in order, starting with Lose-Lose.  “A Lose-Lose situation is when both parties lose.  This is the most ineffective style…” he says.  “Now I have to ask you, do you want to pursue a lose-lose situation?”  Ultimately, the best scenario is the win-win-win, a situation in which both Angela and Oscar are happy with the outcome, and Michael “wins” for having successfully mediated a conflict in the workplace.

Angela and Oscar are in a fight over an “offensive” poster on Angela’s desk.  Michael walks them both over to the poster and asks each of them to express their feelings using “I statements” and “emotion statements”.  Angela states that she got the poster as a gift, appreciates its artistic value, and wants to see it every day.  Oscar finds the poster rude, offensive, and creepy.  He doesn’t want to have to look at it, and he does not think that it’s real art.  

Next, Michael decides that they should all “brainstorm creative alternatives” to find a win-win-win solution.  He immediately comes up with the idea that Angela makes the poster into a t-shirt for Oscar to wear every day.  That way, he can never see it, but Angela gets to see it every time she looks at Oscar.  Michael is happy because the way he sees it, both of them are winning in this scenario, and he came up with the solution (so he wins too).  

When neither Oscar nor Angela can come up with their own solution, Pam suggests that Angela gets to hang the poster on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  According to Michael, however, that would be classified as solution number 3 known as compromise, which is “not ideal.”  Michael ranks every solution to the problem which he thinks is possible:

3. Compromise: Angela gets to hang the poster on Tuesdays and Thursdays

2. Win-lose: Take the poster down so Oscar won’t have to look at something he finds  

offensive

1. Win-win-win: Have Oscar wear a t-shirt of the poster

According to Michael’s manual, a win-win-win situation is always best, so he makes the executive decision that Angela should make the t-shirt.  Michael’s view of the situation is selfish, apathetic, and hastily made.  If anything, he has made the problem worse instead of making it a “win-win-win situation.”    He listens to Angela and Oscar’s sides of the situation, but he takes them too literally.  As a result, he comes up with a solution that makes them both worse off.  Angela has to take down her poster, and Oscar has to wear a t-shirt displaying a poster he finds offensive.  Essentially, Michael takes the conflict-resolution manual too seriously.  He loses sight of the real issue, which is about Angela and Oscar’s feelings, only to come up with a solution that can technically be classified as win-win-win.  If Michael could look closely, however, he would see that it is more like a lose-lose-lose solution.  Angela is left unhappy, Oscar is left unhappy, and Michael hasn’t “resolved” anything.  Angela and Oscar let Michael charge ahead with his solution by reluctantly agreeing to do what he said.  

The show moved on, and the conflict was never truly resolved.  The most ironic thing of all is that if Michael hadn’t decided to step in in the first place, Oscar would have just finished venting to Toby about the problem and moved on.

Michael’s idea that “bringing conflict out into the open” can solve problems causes further problems throughout the episode.  Michael asks to see written records of all the complaints people have every made to Toby about problems they’ve had with others in the workplace.  Toby refuses, saying that it would infringe on everyone’s privacy, but Michael proceeds to snatch it out of Toby’s hands.  “I had to use win-lose that time,” Michael says, “It isn’t pretty.”   

He decides to sort out his newly acquired pile of workplace conflicts by reading them out loud to everyone.  He says that since Toby merely listened to everyone’s problems then waited for them to forget about it, he hates to see such angry feelings festering in the workplace; he decided they must be let out into the open.  Michael effectively makes everyone angry with each other for bringing up old dirt (most of the complaints were marked “redacted”, meaning that the complainer decided to remove the complaint anyway).  

Every single conflict in the episode could have been avoided if Michael had decided to just mind his own business.  Sometimes, bringing conflict out into the open (through a “cage match” to put it in Michael’s words) does more harm than good.  One lesson I’ve learned from this episode is to keep any complaints about others to myself.  The most important one, however, is that listening to people’s problems rather than jumping to a solution is essential.