Question

If you were the Head of Engineering Faculty, comment on the suitability and the eligibility of TzeMay to the position based on her personality traits.

Answer 1

The department

Within the Engineering faculty lies the department of mechanical engineering with some forty staff, most of whom have been at the university for at least eight years and 90 per cent of whom are “career academics‟ who have not held posts in commercial organisations. All are male. The head of department (who is also the Wallace-Price Professor of Engineering) leads the department in a relatively informal and relaxed manner. Like most academics he is a man of ideas rather than an administrator and dislikes formal policies and procedures.

Frequently heard to have made remark that “I do not like tying things or people up in red tape, I prefer a democratic approach”. He has been accused in the past of inconsistency by his staff, of never treating two people in the same way. However, it is true to say that, in general, academic staffs are left to organise their lives as they want within the constraints of their teaching schedule. Their research work is highly respected, several innovative engineering designs have been patented and sold on the open market, and there is a well-established programme of industry collaboration. While the climate of the department is outwardly relaxed and informal, there is very little interaction among staff, particularly outside working hours.

Each academic has his own room, there is no central staff room and many staff work from home, only coming into the department to teach and undertake their administrative duties. Gossip is rife, as is professional jealousy, particularly in terms of gaining research funding. An increase in student numbers, successful franchise arrangements being made to deliver postgraduate courses in China and the Far East and an attempt to reduce teaching loads has led to the department advertising a vacancy for a senior lecturer. Ideally the preferred candidate will have experience of research work, good external business contacts and willing to travel. As is usual in academic institutions, very little, if any, thought is given to the personality of the successful candidate or to the desirability of them fitting in to the rest of the department.

The candidate

TzeMay was one of the first women engineering students at Open University. She graduated in 1995 with a first class honours degree and immediately continued her studies with an MSc programme, gaining recognition for her work into environmentally friendly car engines, a largely untapped field in those days. On completion of her Masters degree she was offered a post as a research assistant where she could have developed her Masters research and worked towards her doctorate. However she decided that she needed to gain some commercial experience and joined Wallace-Price, a blue-chip engineering consultancy where, apart from a sponsored year out to study for an MBA in the United States of America, she has remained ever since.

Her tenacity and loyalty to Wallace-Price have paid off and she was made a partner in the firm, primarily responsible for bringing in work to the consultancy. With the promotion came various executive privileges including an annual salary of £80, 000, a chauffeur-driven car, free use of one of the company-owned London flats, a non-contributory pension scheme, various gold credit cards and first-class air travel. TzeMay herself would not describe these as benefits, however, but as necessities to enable her to do her job properly. In order to meet her business target of £2 million of work for Wallace-Price she spent forty weeks overseas, working an average of ninety hours a week.

She cannot remember the last time that she had a weekend when she was not entertaining clients or travelling but was totally free to indulge herself. During her time with Wallace-Price she has earned a reputation both as a formidable but honest negotiator and as an innovative engineer, often finding seemingly impossible solutions to problems. Known for her single-minded dedication to her job, she does not suffer fools gladly. She is frequently approached to work for rival firms with promises of even greater privileges and has been the subject of numerous magazine profiles, some concentrating on her work and reputation as a high flier but the majority focusing on her gender. Her fortieth birthday last year was spent alone in the Emergency Room of a Los Angeles hospital where she had been rushed with a suspected stomach ulcer. Deprived of her portable telephone, fax and computer she had little else to do but to reflect on her life thus far. On her return to health she was working her way through the pile of technical journals, which had accumulated during her absence and there she saw the advertisement for ABC University, an institution that had close links with her company and whose Professor of Engineering she knew well. Ignoring the instructions relating to applications she put through a telephone call to the ABC University.