Real-Life Decision Making
"As an event coordinator, your first and foremost responsibility is to your client. Your decisions are based on what you perceive your client's wishes to be, because your client has hired you to be their decision-making person," says Martin Metcalfe, an event coordinator.
You're an event planner, and you're in charge of coordinating this year's People's Choice Awards. The prestigious event is held in the city's most elegant hotel and is attended by 1,500 people, including all the local aristocracy.
The Ritz Hotel is unionized, but as a freelance event planner, you don't belong to any union. The hotel workers' union is upset that the hotel management has allowed a non-union operator to work at the hotel. The union wants its own members -- who are employees of the hotel -- to do the work. Thanks to your skillful negotiating, you've managed to handle the situation thus far.
At five minutes to showtime on the night of the event, with 1,500 people ready for the festivities to begin, the lights go out.
Your immediate response is to go to the head of the maintenance department and ask him to flip the breakers. The head of maintenance is a union worker who happens to be attending the party that night.
"It's not my job," he responds. "I'm off duty. You'll have to get someone else."
When you try to find the man who is on duty, you discover that he didn't show up for work that day. Now you've got 1,500 people standing in a partially blacked-out hotel because nobody wants to go downstairs and flip the breakers.
You could march into the hotel manager's office and demand that he override the union's responsibility and flip the switch himself. But this puts him in the position of breaking his own contract with the union, and you face the risk of never being able to work in that hotel again.
"A situation like that can be quite difficult, because if you go up against a union, they can shut your whole project down and you can't do anything," says Metcalfe. "Your client is disappointed and won't pay. Then the union in that hotel has a problem with you."
You don't have time to fool around: you've got 1,500 people standing in the dark, waiting for the event to begin.
What are you going to do?