Austen Advertising Agency:  Impactful Collaboration

Exercise Background

In the competitive and fast-paced world of advertising, how you achieve individual results and collaborate with other creative and business hotshots is essential to success. Visibility is everything.

The executives in this exercise have a compelling mission: identify the one individual who will lead a new organization recently acquired by Austen.  One of the intriguing aspects of this exercise is that each executive’s candidate does not work for them: nor have have any of them ever met the candidates. In addition, to avoid any ethnic and gender bias in the selection process, names are disguised.  Nonetheless the participants will need to effectively synthesize the information presented to them in the pre-work materials and make a compelling case as to why their candidate should be selected.

How the Exercise Works

Each participant in the exercise is an executive who has information about an employee who has been nominated for consideration to run the new acquisition. Some candidates are from Austen and some are from the acquisition. The participants are expected to advocate for their individual to be appointed to the new position. At the same time all participants should be aware of how whoever is selected communicates reinforcement of the organization’s values and culture. Because time is of the essence the team needs to pay attention to how they run the meeting as well as how they use effective team management skills. The expectation is that at the end of the meeting the team will have selected the preferred candidate and rank-ordered the remaining candidates.