Manager Interview

Managers make many decisions every day. Thankfully there are many tools available to a manager as they make these decisions. Tiffany is a General Manager of a franchise in the quick service restaurant industry. She is faced with decisions dozens of times in one day. A large portion of the decisions that she is faced with are made to solve structured problems, however, sometimes an unstructured problem does arise that she needs to address. As well as solving problems Tiffany must also make plans to in order to have structure and organization to achieve the goals set forth by herself and the company that she works for. Looking at some of the decisions that Tiffany has had to make recently it can been seen how she goes about solving structured problems as well as unstructured problems using the eight step decision making process, while using rationality, intuition, evidence based information to not only make decision but also plan. All of the decisions that Tiffany makes and how she goes about making is critical in determining whether she has a linear or non-linear thinking style. The problems that Tiffany has to solve can be broken down into two categories structured and unstructured problems. Most of the problems that she solves day in and day out usually fall into the structured problem category, these problems usually have programmed decisions that go along with them. They can be rules or processes that the company has set forth in order to solve problems that are usually reoccurring and can be easily defined. The structured problem that she encounters most often is a guest receiving the wrong food. The company has a procedure in place to solve this problem they call the procedure LAST (listen, apologize, solve and thank). It involves listening to what the customer’s problem is, apologizing to the costumer for the inconvenience, solving the problem usually by giving the costumer what they had ordered and comping the meal, and lastly thanking the customer for