After graduating from school, you are fortunate to receive an offer as an assistant manager of a marketing department in a company located in New York City, working for a fast-growing company that provides marketing support for companies. Your department specializes in marketing strategies for the Internet and currently consists of 10 people you, your direct supervisor (the manager of the department), and 8 marketing associates. Your job is to help the manager lead the unit to develop long-term strategies for your unit, to maintain excellent customer service with your clients, and to strive to build future business opportunities. The marketing associates in your department work a very flexible schedule and are often offsite, working with the clients at their location to help develop marketing campaigns to improve their business presence, and performance, via the Internet.

After being on the job a short while, you realize that you really need to create another position to help make sure all the necessary work gets completed on time. Essentially, while you and your manager are focusing on the long-term interests of the department and the associates are working very hard to help the clients, many of the administrative aspects of the work are falling by the wayside. For example, no one is currently tracking accounts payable from clients or handling accounts payable to your service providers. As a result, you are spending time on these tasks that are beyond your job expectations. In addition, you are spending an increasing amount of time making travel arrangements such as booking hotels and arranging transportation for your staff. After you talk with the manager of your unit, she agrees that something needs to change to allow you to devote your time to more of the strategic issues in the unit, and she permits you to create a new position to help out in your department. Your challenge now is to determine what this position will be.

Answer the following questions by applying the concepts learned in Chapter 1. Also, conduct literature reviews on the subject of discussion and use to support your case study answers:

What job would you create? Why?

What are the employee competencies this position needs to be successful? Why?

What are your ideas for how you might design performance management, compensation and incentives for this new position? Why?

Are there any particular challenges you would expect to encounter that would make successfully filling this position difficult? How would you overcome these challenges?