Dan Neville is the manager for a team of engineers at RFC, Inc. He is responsible for coordinating his team’s efforts on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, as well as assuring that they are keeping on schedule with teams in other offices around the country. Dan regularly communicates with his own team via e-mail, attaching memos and instructions prior to their regular face-to-face meetings. Clear, consistent, and timely communication is an essential element of Dan’s job.

Dan usually has no trouble in making his team members understand his instructions, except for Kyle Trenton. Kyle always seems to misunderstand or misinterpret Dan’s messages, even during face-to-face meetings. Kyle doesn’t seem to be deliberately obstinate; he honestly derives other meanings from Dan’s communication, and reads into the words that Dan chooses and comes up with implied ideas that Dan never intended.

Inevitably, Dan has to meet with Kyle separately to ensure that Kyle understands the tasks at hand. If left to his own devices, Kyle wouldn’t come to Dan to question his interpretation of the message, because he sincerely believes that he “gets it.” However, Kyle is rarely clear about Dan’s meanings, and Dan must devote extra time and energy to reorient Kyle. Dan tries to be sympathetic, because Kyle is a nice person and a good worker, but Kyle requires twice as much time from Dan than everyone else, and this frustrates Dan. Dan sometimes worries that if Kyle misunderstands critical directions on a building project which are not corrected, someone could legitimately get hurt.

Dan has an opportunity to move Kyle onto a new position, where he would no longer have to work with Dan’s current team and Dan would no longer have to communicate with Kyle. However, Dan knows that Ken Rothberg, the head of that team, is known for being a very poor communicator. And if Dan were to go ahead and move Kyle onto this position, he suspects that Ken wouldn’t take any additional time to ensure that Kyle understood his instructions and that could cause even more critical problems for the organization.

Questions

1. Using consequential, rule-based and character theories, evaluate Dan’s options.

2. What should Dan do? Why?