Amelia Rogers at Tassani Communication

(Team members: Sri Lakshmi Yedlapalli, Parthraj Jadeja, Sabila Rafique, Alexis Wang)

In 1980, Tassani Communication (TC) was founded by Sally Tassani which later was joined by
an employee turned Partner, Jim Paglia in Chicago. Both, Sally and Jim brought unique
characteristics to the spectrum of this integrated marketing, communication company to cater
from low volume, higher budgeted accounts (clients) to the high volume, low budgeted accounts.

Sally’s public relations and entrepreneur skills coupled with Jim’s brilliantly savvy strategic
approach to account (client) management had been making them successful even in the times of
a shaky economy while others were struggling. As far as the leadership styles go, Sally was more
maternal and liked to reward employees but Jim had always been considered tougher to please
by employees although both were able to get the job done on time.

TC had a flat organized hierarchical structured in terms of roles and responsibilities. Sally acted
as a CEO and President was emphasizing on new business development while Jim acted as
Executive VP and COO, was focused on day to day operations, creative clearing house of the
agency which means supervising creative strategy of each account TC landed. Furthermore, there
existed one pool for financial expenditure for all along with no specific revenue target from each
of the account managers to bring in for the company.

There was a defined business process to handle and go about any account that comes in for TC.
It goes from meeting the client for the first time to deciding and presenting the final ides to the
clients. The process is as follows:

 Step 1: Sally /New Business Development Team Member brings in New Account
 Step 2: Account manager gets assign
 Step 3: Account Manager scopes out to Creative Head
 Step 4: Account manager and Creative Head work together, go back and forth and come
up with ideas in reference with client’s expectation and creative scope of those
expectations in all possible way
 Step 5: Team meets with Jim and Present the ideas
 Step 6: Jim scrutinize from different aspects, ask questions and decide
 Step 7: Present the idea to the client.

This case study revolves around the situation which occurred in 1999 between an account
manager and a creative director at TC on an account, Muffler world, when an Experienced
Account manager, hired and trusted by Jim, Amelia Rogers was informed by the client, Muffler
World, that it was contacted by the Creative Director of the account, Dave Burns without her
knowledge.

Problem:
Amelia’s authority was clearly undermined in this situation as Dave approached the client
directly. The creative director should never communicate directly with the client unless it is
about a certain tactical issue and it is cleared with Amelia Rogers, the account director.

It seems that Dave Burns was not too clear on the guidelines within Amelia’s role as account
manager and his role as creative on the account. It showed poor communication between the two
and also, highlighted Amelia’s ability to manage her team inefficiently.

Furthermore, it aroused a discomfort, confusion and lack of confidence in the mind of client
about how the project is being handled.

Contributing factors:

 Poor collaboration between the creative director and account manager

 Interpersonal conflicts: Amelia is too rigid and Dave is too liberal
 Lack of boundaries in their roles: Both creative director and account manager crossed
their lines and tried to intervene in each other’s job roles. Amelia trying to give too much
detail on how to create the solution and Dave trying to sell his idea playing the role of
Amelia.
 Organization structure as per financial transactions: Unlike other Ad agencies, in Tassani
communications each department did not operate as a separate profit center created
problem such as less accountability and excessive expenditure in some occasion. This
basically demands a lot more collaboration between departments than expected.
 Budget Issues: Creativity department did not have the liberty to do their job in the way
they intend to due to budget issues. Dave Burns was bound by the budget so he tried to
communicate with the client to avoid going back to shoot photography.
 Rogers went overboard trying to be Jim Paglia: Jim Paglia, as the executive VP and chief
operating officer supervised the creative strategy of each account with his excellent
experience. On the other hand, Rogers who was trying to act like Paglia had her main
focus on the account budget rather than trying to bring out the creativity
 Pressure due to work overload: Rogers is overloaded with three other accounts along with
the Muffler world franchise. Dave has recently taken over the responsibility as the
creative head for the entire company as the other two creative directors were laid-off due
to budget issues.
 Lack of code of conduct: If there is a strict code of conduct for the company just like a
“Credo” for Johnson n Johnson, this problem would not have occurred as all the
employees would have showed the best conduct in their job role.
 The Clients, source of conflict: Every client is unique and comes with different
expectation, understanding level and preconceived notion of how the project should end.
It makes task of account manager (expected to uphold the client’s interest at all times)
and creative department (bound to bring out ideas without any creativity compromise)
difficult and sometimes, in conflict.
Possible solutions with their pros and cons:

 Resolving the issue through proper communication: The core issue here was who controls
the client and who communicates. It was mentioned in the case study that Dave Burns
can be argumentative at times when his ideas were being questioned and that he had
trouble accepting other people’s point of view. A meeting between Amelia Rogers and
Dave Burns to discuss the issue and clarify the miscommunications could resolve the
issue.
Cons: Strong, opinionated personalities, if not open minded, can make this process
complicated; end up being more distant and rigid.
 Organizational re-design: Building a proper organizational structure where every
department is aware of the project budgeting and operate as a separate profit center. This
will demand more responsibility from each department as opposed to one person (account
manager) trying hard to control the project budget.
Cons: This approach demands more accountability in turn more responsibility and hard
work, which for many would be hard to adapt to in this organization.
 Participative management: According to the case study, it looks like the Tassani
communications has more of a benevolent authoritative system. So, changing the
management style to participative group systems will give an opportunity for all the
employees to play an important role in decision making and encounters high degree of
participation and productivity especially when inter-departmental collaboration is needed.
Cons: This approach will bring too much freedom in terms of ideas and hence, can create
conflicts.
 Group level Diagnosis: This will help improve the interaction among members. It will
clarify the roles and responsibilities of each department and will help analyze the team
functioning in a group.
Cons: It can make people pretend to look good and to put best foot forward, be defensive
if countered.
 Individual level Analysis: Analyzing how much freedom and discretion is given to the
individual in performing their job.
Cons: It will make individuals interrogative and scrutinize, could be overwhelming.
 Feedback: An effective feedback given to the employees and taken from the employees
can avoid such situations in the future as they can know the difference between the
expectations and the reality.
Cons: It will not be appreciated by employees if no results are expected
 Performance based reward system: It looks like there is no proper reward system in place
at TC. Implementing a performance based reward system will encourage employees to
own the project, prioritize their goals even under work pressure rather than going into
arguments or interfering with other person’s job role.
Cons: It can bring competitiveness among employees, undermining collaboration and
teamwork.
Recommendations and scale of measure:

We believe that one possible solution cannot put an end to the problems here; instead a
combination of possible solutions is what we need in order to resolve the problem. We
recommend applying both, Group level diagnosis and Individual level diagnosis approaches that
will help to understand the current functioning of the organization at both levels and to design
the change intervention for betterment of the organization’s functioning in future.

Group level diagnosis will lead to understand group dynamics among members in each group,
provide platform to raise issues and to suggest solutions and clarifies the roles and
responsibilities of each department.

Individual level diagnosis will help to understand individual potential and issues. Also, to decide
the amount of freedom and discretion should be given to each individual person at the
organization

It has been said that before you can improve something, you have to able to measure it. The best
way to measure the improvement in performance will be by feedback. Feedback should be
timely, appropriate in terms of length of information, mode and audience.

Our suggestion is to develop a monthly, anonymous survey form run through the organization
starting from each department to their respective heads which end up in HR and forwarded to
Head of the companies in a higher level format disclosing performance, profits and issues to
identify pattern for problems and to suggest solution.

Course concepts:

 Organizational design
 Group level diagnosis, Individual level diagnosis
 Boundaries: Intervention between groups responsibilities and functions
 Technology and structure issues
 Human Process issues
 Collecting and Analyzing Diagnostic information
 Feedback
 Evaluation and Institutionalizing
 Management style

All the concepts mentioned above, guided us, as individuals and as a team, to understand
different aspects of this case study and led us to think, to apply and to come up with solutions for
the problems we identified.