Question

On April 12, 2018 an incident occured at a Starbucks Coffee shop in Philadelphia, Pa.(On Thursday in Philadelphia, two black men were removed from a Starbucks by police at the behest of the store’s manager, who said they had tried to use the bathroom without buying something. A patron filmed the incident and posted it on Twitter, where it soon went viral. A second video was uploaded to YouTube. Since then, the story has made national news, with the CEO of Starbucks apologizing and announcing that all Starbucks employees will soon undergo training to recognize unconscious bias.) Based on your studies Please write a report on the causes and effects of the incident evaluate the response by Starbuck's Corporate Management. You should analyze the insident on the operations and corporate level of Starbuck's (operations employees/managers, corporate management/policies) considering the skills(managerial effectiveness.communication, motivation, leading and teaming) needed and how they apply to this situation. Please do a top to bottom analysis considering the corporate mission and values and the effect of this Starbucks. Include your opinion,based on the information studied. on the solution proposed/being implemented by Starbucks's corporate management. This paper should identify problems and solutions in a realistic application of interpersonal skills.

Answer 1

The core values of the company reflect in their mission statement that reaffirms their commitment to inspire and nurture the human spirit and following the principle of " One person, one cup and one neighbour at a time". However the incident in no way conforms to their mission statement, where two customers were shunted out of the store presumably on racial gorunds, just because they entered the store and did not buy anything. Soemone who enters the store is not bound to buy something if he finds none of his / her interest. The washrooms are meant for the customers in general, not for the ones only who bought something. The practice is a gross violation of the intent of the company ( at least if we go by the mission statement)

Occurance of such events indicates towards lack of sensitivity among the employees towards race, caste, creed, religion, color or national origin. Either the top leadership of the company failed to formulate a lesson in form of cultural sensitivity training among the employees during their induction in the company or later, while knowing very well that they operate in a multi cultural, multi ethnic environment, or the operations and Human resources team did not comply with the guiding values of the company by not training their subordinates in customer dealing. Whatever be the case, the incident brought a bad name for the company for being intolerant towards racial differences.

Ideally the cultural sensitivity should be a core principle among the other guiding principles of the company and the mandate should come from top management. The ground level employees should be taught and trained to follow that sensitivity and an acumen should be developed in them to identify between a casual behavior that needs to be dealt with a friendly smile and a threatening act that needs the use of force in rare cases It is a greater responsibility of the managers to motivate, train, guide and assist their subordinates to align their thoughts and actions.to the core guiding philosophies of the company, look for violations and correct them before they cause bigger impacts.