Introduction to James T. McCoy –Flight Line Manager at Peterson Air Force Base (PAF)
James T. McCoy works as a flight line manager at 41st AMU (Aircraft Maintenance Unit) of PAF (Peterson Air Force Base) in California. He is a USAF (United States Air Force) veteran, who has served for 27 years. After getting retired, he continued serving USAF for the last 10 years as a civil servant. James is responsible for keeping all his seven allocated aircraft ready to glide as per the schedule. He is deeply associated with the HR in order to ensure the successful hiring of sufficiently qualified personnel and also responsible for supervising the delivery of efficiently executable work schedules, supplies, training, support systems, equipment and performance reporting. Mr. McCoy does not handle all these tasks alone but he supervises four more subordinates to which he delegates the duties.
Interview Details
On June 28th 2016, I interviewed Mr. J. T. McCoy after requesting him to spare some time for me while allowing to inquire about some of the major issues and challenges that he encounters specifically at 41st AMU in PAF. Once the discussion started about the issues and challenges, I inquire him to tell about the strategies that he uses to mitigate or manage these issues. Apparently, after analyzing the discussion and interview, as well as, researching over the excerpt of that, I came up with some recommendations that may help J. T. McCoy dealing with the situations if they may ascend in future.
Major Challenges & Issues Faced by J. T. McCoy at AMU
Problem # 01 - Hiring Process
While answering to my question regarding the major challenges and issues that he may face being a manager, McCoy mentioned that generally he come across all the conventional and contemporary HR challenges while fulfilling his job task of providing the most qualified and skilled individual for the position. He mentioned the issues of qualification and aptitude hiring as one of the definitive. According to him, selecting and situating the right person at the right position is one the biggest challenge that he encounter especially when quality workforce is required and he has to meet all other constraints that government hiring process has imposed over him (Yadav, 2014). He asserts that defining success criteria for a successful candidate is very difficult as when it comes to employees, there are a number of factors that should be looked after effectively. He mentioned that qualification is one of the biggest aptitudes that should be given substantial significance when hiring someone for the technical job.
While evocating from his early days at AMU when he was an active duty manager; he quoted an example of a new employee who was assigned to AMU to manage a specific airframe as he possessed sufficient knowledge of the assigned airframe. He was additionally provided with OJT (On-Job Training) that sharpened his skills and assisted him to perform the task formally. Whereas the problem started due to the hiring process for civil servant position in government institutions. According to Longley (2015), anyone can apply for a job opening through USAJOB.gov, which is a national job posting platform. McCoy agree that the recruitment criteria at the website satisfactorily collect the information like resume, individual personal details, core competencies, and answers to KSAs (knowledge, skills & abilities) questions and it facilitate a lot in filtering the pool of applicants into pool of potential candidates and then fetching the most proficient candidates for an interview (Levesque, 2015). However, he finds some other factor disturbing too. For instance, factors like allotment of extra points due to military association/priority, preference points for veterans, and additional points for disable veterans are some of the major aspects that according to McCoy hold him back from hiring the most qualified, skilled, and efficient individual for a certain job (Spector, 2013).
While mentioning one of his experiences, he quoted a case of hiring for the position of KC-135R Aircraft Mechanic, for which he wanted to hire Roberta Smith because she was the most qualified candidate as per her credentials, qualifications, and skills. Roberta Smith has already served in USAF for 4 years until her enlistment with USAF ended 10 years back. She then joined Boeing Corporation as an Upgrader and Modifier for the similar airframe. Her resume was verified and impeccable and her KSAs were ultimately outstanding for the position of KC-135R Aircraft Mechanic.
On the other hand, the other candidate on the waiting list was Tim Jones, who was a retired mechanic of F-16 and has a qualified disability rate of 30%. Time Jones has an experience of working for F-16 but never got an opportunity to work on the airframe of KC-135R. Moreover, while being associated with USAF for more than 20 years as F-16’s Mechanic out of which, his last 12 years were spent on working as a Tool Room Manager and not as an active aircraft mechanic. Lastly, although his credentials and KSAs were good but not as admirable as Roberta Smith. Unfortunately, McCoy had to hire Tim Jones just because he earns greater priority and points for being a disabled veteran. McCoy also mentioned that hiring Tim Jones caused USAF an additional cost of sending him to the training school under the supervision of an experienced aircraft mechanic in order to acquire an adequate set of skills. This took back the opportunity from McCoy, as well as, from USAF for having a competent candidate like Roberta who had years of experience with the same aircraft and could have immediately hit the ground to kick-start her job while contributing towards the objectives as compared to Tim Jones, who not only took time but cost too. However, Roberta was later hired due to her outstanding credentials.
Problem # 02 – Diversity Issues
The second biggest challenge faced by J.T McCoy is to manage a diverse workforce. He tells that as America is melting pot of diverse individuals; when they hire, they receive applications from individuals that have different backgrounds, religion, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and age (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2014). He discusses that not only hiring diverse people is an issue, but to integrate them in a team and managing diversity issues is yet another big challenge. According to McCoy, managing diversity issues is imperative to ensure workplace harmony, successful achievement of objective, conflict-free working environment, and higher productivity (Need, 2016).
While mentioning an experience, McCoy quoted that during his active days of duty, there was an instance when they were having a ranking structure to determine duty in charge for the day. He mentioned while emphasizing over the rankings that all the civil servants working at a similar grade are equal. For instance, if Roberta and Tim both were hired, they would be working as equals at the grade Wage-12 (WG-12) regardless of the difference in their experience. Roberta was a 30 years old Caucasian women and she was also gay; whereas Tim was a 55 years old African-American male who had heterosexual preferences. Tim had issues with Roberta as she was a young white gay woman who was working at WG-12 just like him and directing him about how the tasks should be performed. Tim had a conflict as he thinks that she has being picked for her race and age. McCoy also mentioned that since he doesn’t have resources to have enough number of supervisors and leaders to be assigned to each airframe; they are compelled to rely on the experienced people to ensure that the flight-worthy aircraft are available and his workforce is working together though he admits that this is not the solution.
Problem Fixes Used by J. T. McCoy
McCoy told in his interview that how problems arise and what measures he took to fix them. Most of the strategies that he used showed the best possible results but it only subsided the problem for a shorter period of time and as a result, the issues would appear later at some of the most unfortunate time. McCoy shared that most of the time he had to turn away prospective employees referred to him by currently experienced ones so that he can make space for the people he wants to hire. But this obviously cost USAF higher due to the high rate of employee turnover. He mentioned that in order to address the constraints of hiring people with preferences, he usually hire them while keeping the qualified candidate on hold for a period of 12 months. By doing this, he evaluates the capacity of the employee and gives him/her a leverage to perform within this period. If the employee fails to perform, he then replaces him with the candidate of his choice. He also discussed that whenever as employee fails to perform during the time, the candidate on hold used to get other employment opportunity. This brings a bigger loss and at last caused McCoy to restart the process of hiring to find the right candidate (Longley, 2015).
While talking about the second issue, he mentioned that diversity issue like the one faced by Roberts and Tim caused a loss of 500 hours to the unit. Apparently, due to the discriminatory behavior of Tim, Roberta was being suspended for 14 days because she was accused of being racist against him. He further accused her for being discriminatory by assigning the task in a demeaning manner that makes him feel disparaging being a black man. Roberta actually wanted Tim to urinal off the aircraft to be deflated, cleaned, and reinstalled (a job done by a maintainer); whereas, she chose to repair the hydraulic actuator because Tim did not know to fix it. When he refused to do that job, she also yelled at him by taunting over his age called him being ‘an old dupe’. Roberta’s behavior was wrong as she not only lost her temper but also tease Tim for his age. McCoy mentioned that after the incident, they arrange a sensitivity training for more than 83 employees that educate them about diversity value and discrimination issues. This took more than 500 working hours in total.
Recommendations for J. T. McCoy
It is recommended to J. T. McCoy to conduct a comprehensive job analysis at his work center. This will provide him with the direction to re-write job listing and will assist him in screening out the average prospective employees while listing essentials that are fundamental for screening out a candidate. This will help him to select the candidate who has previous experience and necessary skills. Additionally, undertaking bi-annual performance evaluation would help him identify the performance level of employees while also facilitating employees to make improvements. He can make decisions accordingly by analyzing if the employee is able to meet standards or not. In order to address the diversity issues, McCoy should undertake comprehensive diversity management strategy that educates employee about the cultural differences, sensitivity, and discrimination. They should also undertake policies and plan related to group dynamics, team management and motivation (Longley, 2015).
References
Longley, R. (2015). Government Job Hiring Process Made Easier. Data Retrieved From http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/05/12/government-job-hiring-process-made-easier.htm on July 1, 2016
Spector, P. E. (2013). Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Research and Practice (6th Ed.). Retrieved from https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/content/eBookLibrary2/content/TOC.aspx?assetdataid=5f1274cf-f556-4d6d-8753-0740790c2a9d&assetmetaid=86ea458c-8a8b-4a89-8862-73b3e9e2c7d9 on July 1, 2016
Levesque, L. L. (2015). Opportunistic hiring and employee fit. Human Resource Management, 44(3), 301-317. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hrm.20072/full on July 1, 2016
Wrzesniewski, A., & Dutton, J. E. (2014). Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work. Academy of management review,26(2), 179-201. http://amr.aom.org/content/26/2/179.full on July 1, 2016
Need, W. C. D. H. P. (2016). Human resource management: Gaining a competitive advantage. http://s3.amazonaws.com/prealliance_oneclass_sample/e5kKbwZMpg.pdf on July 1, 2016
Yadav, R. (2014). Managing Global HR Issues in Today’s Challenging Times. https://works.bepress.com/rakesh_yadav/8/download/on July 1, 2016
