Why DineEquitys CEO Julia A Stewart Manages Like a Teacher Case Solution

2. Analysis

Julia was concerned about her father's displeasure over her choice of entering the restaurant food services and managing a restaurant chain. Her father had been a successful teacher who had helped, guided, facilitated students through his teaching and mentoring styles. Julia had grown up under the influence of these mentoring techniques and had involuntarily taken them on. Her management style and skills were therefore developed under this initial influence and thus, she managed like a professional teacher. However, Julia still wanted to reconcile with her father and wanted to rebuild their relationship.

After some years, Julia invited her father to visit her restaurants with her. By this time, she was an as successful manager and owner. Her father observed her management style and saw that she mentored and taught more than being a boss. He was happy to see that she had adopted points and lessons from his teaching career, and had implemented them in building a successful career for herself. Just like her father had mentored students, and had helped them achieve the best, Julia mentored and guided her employees, and encouraged them to perform to the best of their abilities and capabilities. Instead of acting like a boss, she acts like a friend. This makes her employees feel more at ease and makes them more comfortable in communicating with her as well as the rest of the team. Her father realized that she was also mentoring and teaching – but just in a different way and reconciled his differences over her career choice. The next section identified how Julia implemented her father's teaching success and sills in the managing of a food business and why it turned out to be successful.

• Solution

To achieve success similar to her father's, Julia implements the complete performance management cycle, as demonstrated in figure 9-1 (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013). Julia is vigilant in setting goals, and seeing them through. The most important aspect of a management cycle is to set practical goals in congruence with employees. Julia apparently sets the goals with her employees so that they know what is expected. Further, she also monitors and evaluates their performance regularly, and offers to coach and mentoring where needed through suggesting improvements. There are also intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for employees which serve as positive reinforcement and motivators, and thus, encourage employees to put in more effort in their jobs (Bourne & Bourne, 2011). Through the performance management cycle, Julia has been successful in not only setting goals and evaluating and rewarding performance but also in providing constructive feedback to employees to refine their personal and professional skills further. Moreover, she ensures that goals, such as those concerned with customer service and operations, are always present in the line of sight of managers and employees.

Julia Stewart continuously motivates and engages her employees and encourages them to put in more efforts. Julia achieves performance outcome goals through her goal setting strategies as is evident from the examples highlighted in the case study. She not only recognizes and appreciates the taco proportioning skills of an employee but also sets it as an example and a benchmark to be followed by other employees. This made the goals she set also learning goals that employees learned and excelled by performing over and over again (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2013).