Principal-agent model
In this blogpost, I will write about a very known theory, namely the Principal-Agent Theory. Normally, this theory is with only one principal and one agent. However, this is not always the case in real life. I experience the Principal-Agent Theory like a triangle were there are two principals and one agent. I had this experience at a company where I worked almost two years ago. I was the agent, the first principal was my manager (the company) and the second one was the client/customer that I had to advice and sell to in the store, Douglas.
My job was to give a good service with advising and selling towards the client. Douglas is a big company and before I was able to help clients, I had to follow a one-day course in Utrecht (NL). I learned how Douglas wanted me to interact with the clients, they wanted me to welcome everyone in the store and to ask them if I could help them with anything. After I asked this, I had to try to sell anything different than where the client came for and at last, I had to ask them if I could parfum or make up them. Douglas considered this as a optimal experience in the store as a client. However, on the actual work floor, I experience different clients with different preferences. I noticed that some clients prefer to discover the store themselves and they didn't want a seller that was too enthousiast about a product they didn't came for and that wanted spray parfum on them as a nice gesture. Here is where I found it hard to meet both the principal's ideals.
Those two different ideas of the principals made it hard for me to perform as good as I wanted to. I was sixteen years old when I started to work there and I was too shy to talk to my manager about it. However, if I would work there at this time of my life, I think I would make the effort to talk about it with my manager to resolve this problem. Unfortunately, I can see it happen that my manager wouldn't be bothered by changing the way of helping clients and would say to me that I just have to try harder.
I see where my manager is coming form, since she wasn't the person that came up with this strategy. I don't really think that my personal influence wouldn't be powerful enough to solve this problem. I think I could have tried to work more with client that liked the help to avoid the client that didn't want the help, but according to the strategy, this wouldn't be optimal, since you're not helping everyone in the store then. I also could have tried to create my own way of fulfilling the strategy in a non-pushy way, but this wouldn't be a solution for all the employees. I personally think that Douglas should change its way of helping people in the store based on the interaction with the client. Developing a different strategy for clients that doesn't like help by a seller would be more effective then treating different clients the same.
An other way to look at this is with the question whether the agent will fail by only fulfilling the wishes of one of the principals. In my opinion, it does. You will leave one of the principals unhappy, while finding a solution to work it out together will leave everyone neutral or happier than neutral. I find that better than disappointing one of the principals. However, if there is not a solution, I wonder if it is better to fulfill both principal's wishes half or one principal's wish fully. I think that I would go for fulfilling both principal's wishes, since I know that I find it hard to disappoint someone totally.
