Selina Lo loves her job as the manager of a toy store in San Francisco. She loves the chaos and the excitement of kids as they wander around the store searching for their favorite toys. Teddy bears pulled off the shelves and toy trucks left on the floor are part and parcel of managing a toy store. Yet her biggest challenge, which is a problem faced by many retailers, is employee turnover. Many of her employees leave after just a few months on the job because of hectic schedules and long work hours. Selina is always looking for new ways to keep her employees committed to their jobs. She also takes care of customers’ requests and complaints and tries to address them satisfactorily. This is what Selina’s life as a manager is like. However, retailers are finding that people with Selina’s skills and enthusiasm for store management are few and far between. Managing a retail store is not the career that most college graduates aspire to. Attracting and keeping talented managers continues to be a challenge for all kinds of retailers.

Suppose you’re a recruiter for a large retail chain and want to get college graduates to consider store management as a career option. Using what you learned in Part 1, how would you do that?

Global Sense Who holds more managerial positions worldwide, women or men? Statistics tell an interesting story. In the United States, women held 40 percent of all managerial positions and 21 percent held senior leadership roles, but only 4.8 percent of the Fortune 500 CEO spots. Interestingly, emerging economies have high proportions of women in top positions.
In Africa, 89 percent of businesses have at least one woman in senior management, while women are in senior management positions in 87 percent of Eastern European businesses. In Western Europe, 79 percent of French businesses have at least one woman in a senior leadership role, while the United Kingdom has 75 percent. Germany fares worse, with no women CEOs leading their top 30 companies and women holding only 9 percent of positions on executive boards of top companies. Two countries in Asia with high percentages of women CEOs are Thailand (40 percent) and Vietnam (25 percent). By contrast, 10 percent of CEOs in Singapore are women. In Australia, 16.5 percent of CEOs or heads of businesses are women.
As you can see, companies across the globe continue to have a large gender gap in leadership. Men far outnumber women in senior business leadership positions. These circumstances exist despite efforts and campaigns to improve equality in the workplace. Where there has been significant progress is Europe. Many countries there require corporations to allocate a specified percentage of board seats to women. For example, since 2008 Norway has required 40 percent of board seats to be held by women. But women in Norway still only make up 7 percent of CEOs, so progress hasn’t spread evenly across all kinds of leadership positions.
To address leadership inequality outside the boardroom, companies like Deutsche Telekom in Germany have set recruiting goals to increase the number of women in their talent pipeline. Deutsche Telekom strives for women to comprise half of their new trainees and for women to make up at least 30 percent of those short-listed for management positions.
Some women who have been on track to CEO positions say the problem is not with the leadership pipeline. Instead, it’s at least partly about biases— often unconscious biases—that women face. Women can be penalized for acting forcefully, looked over for challenging assignments, and not fully heard during meetings. Chevron thinks part of the answer to these problems is teaching executives about how unconscious biases may be leading women to opt out of the path to top leadership positions. Chevron invested $5 million in a “Men Advocating Real Change” training effort and has increased the percentage of women on its board to 36 percent. Chevron’s CEO, Mike Wirth, says the company has seen increased innovation as a result of their diversity and inclusion efforts.........¹

Discussion Questions

 P1-1. What management skills do you think would be most important for Kevin Johnson to have? Why?
What skills do you think would be most important for a Starbucks store manager to have? Why?
P1-2. How might the following management theories/
approaches be useful to Starbucks: scientific management, organizational behavior, quantitative approach, systems approach?
P1-3. Choose three of the current trends and issues facing managers and explain how Starbucks might be impacted. What might be the implications for first-line managers? Middle managers? Top managers?
P1-4. Give examples of how Kevin Johnson might perform interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles.
P1-5. Look up Kevin Johnson and notice what is mentioned about him. How might his experiences and background affect the way the company is managed?
P1-6. Go to the company’s website, www.starbucks.com, and find the list of senior officers. Pick one of those positions and describe what you think that job might involve. Try to envision what types of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling this person would have to do.
P1-7. Look up the company’s mission and guiding principles at the company’s website. What do you think of the mission and guiding principles?
P1-8. Describe how these would influence how a barista at a local Starbucks store does his or her job.
Describe how these would influence how one of the company’s top executives does his or her job.
P1-9. What made Starbucks’s response to the Philadelphia crisis a non-programmed decision?
To ensure that store managers across the company use programmed decisions in order to respond in a consistent way to non-buying customers, what would need to be done?