Image Restoration Strategies

Box 10.12 on p. 306 identifies different strategies that companies use when the face crisis situations. As I read through each of them I thought about different crisis situations that have occurred recently with the financial institutions and tried to equate these strategies to what those companies used. For example, the spending spree that the executive of AIG went on after the bailout was seen as bad taste and questioned the intentions of the executives. The way that they attempted to explain this was that it had been scheduled for a year and that canceling the retreat would be more expensive than continuing with it. They used the strategy of reducing the offensiveness of the event to explain it away and reduce the fallout of the act.

Misunderstandings and Conflict

I have a co-worker is our web-developer. She knows a lot about technology, computers, and design but she does not know how to communicate that information very well. I have to work closely with her and I discovered early on that she speaks tech-speak to anyone and everyone, whether they have a technical background or knowledge or not. I have learned to cope with her communication style but it did create conflict at first. I never understood what she was asking for or telling me so I would do it wrong and we would both get frustrated. I learned to repeat back to her what I was hearing so we could ensure that we were on the same page.

I see it create conflict with others in the team as well though. They too have many misunderstanding and mutual frustrations because they do not speak each others “language”. I have learned to understand what she is saying so I feel like I am sometimes the translator because I rephrase her tech terms into layman’s terms.

Conflicting Roles

One of many sources of conflict of my past boss and I was the conflict of our roles. She had worked at the organization for more than 20 years starting in the role I was currently in and moving all the way up to the position of CEO and President. When I began working there I had done something similar in a previous role and therefore was confident in my ability to do more than just the tasks assigned to me. The conflict occurred when I did not do things the way that she was used to. It was the common case of “multiple ways to do the same thing right”. She felt that because it had been done the way she was doing it for so long that it was the only way and it certainly created conflicted. I also took on tasks above and beyond what was defined in my job description and she interpreted that as me trying to replace her and as she called it “be the boss”. I think that she imagined a source of threat and therefore created conflict.