Transcription
Hi Karen, it's Maxwell from Atkinson Consulting Group here. As you know, Millennium Airlines is required to have a hierarchy structure. And before we delved into this, I just wanted to cover the external challenges the organization is facing.
To start, bargaining power of buyers is high and continuing to rise. Consumers are asking for more and more from airline organizations. You are expecting costs to be continuously cut. As for any organization, this is a problem due to profit margins shortening with each effort to meet consumer demands.
In conjunction with this are trends such as the "We Stay on the Ground" movement and consumer preferences for more direct flights. With globally recognized names like Coldplay and Greta Thunberg leading the cause for lower carbon offsets from airline organizations, this is putting great strain on Millennium to meet demands.
Following these is the restriction of border closures due to the pandemic. This being out of our control, Millennium must be prepared for when airline travel is fully operational again. Sanitation and social distancing practices must be the number one priority to alleviate stress.
Secondly, Millennium will need to utilize the relationship it has with Boeing. If Millennium is able to develop new flight paths that are primarily direct and have much lower carbon offsets, this will help meet the consumer demands.
My ideal structure was to remove lower middle management altogether and to cut back on the vast amount of functions in the organization and really streamline Millennium's hierarchy. This would allow more resources to be put into money-making departments. However, it became apparent that the organization has a heavy reliance on both levels of management and removing an entire level would have many negative impacts, potentially outweighing the positives.
As you would know, Karen, many political games are present throughout the organization that have influence over areas and members within Millennium. Firstly, long-standing relationships are being used to affect the outcome of the organization. To put names to faces, Roger and Naresh are the main contributors to this culture, demonstrating high social capital by being Saint Aloysius graduates and part of the Apex Club, which is promoting social in-groups such as these within the organization that receive an unfair advantage compared to others.
Due to sponsorship, budgeting, and alliance building games, Roger was using budgeting games in the board meeting agenda to restrict Ralph's minutes to present Flagship, which is unethical, as Flagship is a major key to helping Millennium. Naresh was also advocating that companies need to need finance officers in every department to get the organizations moving properly. Both budgeting and expertise games were used here, as he wants most of the funding to go into finance to limit the resources of others. James Jarvis is also partaking in budgeting and alliance building games, as his department has gone well over their target spending and is asking others to take on some of the finance expenses.
I'd also like to mention, for your sake, that team members don't appreciate how little around you are in the company. Most of them do like you, but I would recommend trying to present, trying to be as present as possible in the organization now that you've finished your maternity leave. Certain members, such as Claire Moore, think you're dead. And she has some social capital, being in the organization for 23, now three years now. If I were you, I'd take action to this early, before she uses any political games to impact your performance or position.
There was also a high presence of expertise games, and every department sees themselves as the key to saving the company, especially finance, across the board. Others were taking part in alliance building games in order to win over certain members on the decision for Flagship. Honestly, I don't oppose to this, as the more people on board the better, because Flagship is looking to really help Millennium.
Originally, I wanted to remove Roger because of the little that he offers as a board executive. Although he has been in the game for a long time now, he has lost sight throughout those years and is now just using his status and relationships to better himself and those he has loyalty towards, like James and Naresh. He isn't really showing active efforts towards bettering the organization, but he's a board executive with long-standing alliances with other high-ranking members in the organization, so this decision would cause controversy and major discourse within Millennium. Hence why I proposed to incorporate an intermediary body between the board and executives in attempt to mitigate any political gains and influence between board members such as Roger may have on other organized, other members.
I felt as though Millennium should keep separate functions at the lower level, such as ground staff, seeing as the company is trying to minimize employee turnover. I propose the organization implements an informed cooperative structure and plan to eliminate an entire level of the organizational management. But upon analyzing the internal environment of Millennium, it became apparent that there is heavy reliance on all levels of management. This made it difficult to decide, as the only solution I believe to be justifiable was trimming the fat throughout both levels.
As Julie said in one of the interviews, the key to this is not to cut away, but to instead to build and expand. I agree with this to a certain extent. Expanding and opening of more functions is not necessarily what the company needs, like, especially when you're looking at saving costs and implementing a cooperative structure, as the structure itself will incorporate a lot of cross-department collaboration with more sharing of knowledge, resources, and technologies, and continually improving efficiency. Instead, trim the areas lacking or unnecessary, like HR, finance, and marketing, and put more towards the areas that are making the organization money, such as Information Systems and Flamingo Air. This will be a key driver for the next few years to come, as the new strategic seating campaign is up and running that will bring in a lot of capital. Marketing will have enough resources through the collaboration that will be able to execute the, um, new marketing campaign.
I do hope that all of what I have offered and recommended will assist you in Millennium Airlines in the future. Thank you very much.