ASSIGNMENT 18: Impression Management Case Study

 Impression Management Case Study

Title: Skill vs. Intent

Rakesh Sharma was an intern at a fashion company called Vaunt founded by Amritha Pai who is also the CEO of the same company. He someday wished to be the Managing Director at Vaunt. Rakesh finished his Master’s in Fashion management in 2019 and landed his internship here after graduation. He was under project manager Marcel’s guidance who used Rakesh’s skills and efforts to benefit from, using him solely as an assistant without exposing him to the company’s work environment for a manager. Rakesh’s lack of experience in management was overlooked as the employees were all highly trained and skilled due to which he was assumed by the superiors to be of the same level as the rest. The company went through a series of layoffs where Rakesh’s boss Marcel was removed from his job among a few others. Rakesh and his fellow employees were tasked with various assignments to prove themselves worthy of being the next Managing Director of Vaunt. The assignments included heading the costume department of a high-profile campaign and selecting their designs for Vaunt’s Summer-Spring 2023 collection whose runway would be led by the new Managing Director, the Creative Director, and the reputed Fashion Designers in Milan which is undoubtedly the most glamorous part of working in a fashion company. On hearing this, Rakesh went up to Amritha Pai’s office to confess his lack of expertise in the field and that maybe he is not fit for the job due to negligent exposure at managing fashion events whereas all his fellow trainees had already put up photoshoots and fashion advertisements. Pai was astonished to hear of such frankness from an employee which only made her motivate him to work on these assignments regardless of the experience he has had and the result. Rakesh took Pai’s advice and started working on his assignments. Being Marcel’s assistant for quite some time, he was exposed to more of Marcel’s work than he thought since he was able to access his contacts and talk his way through getting favors from artists and brands that helped him with his first assignment. His innate talent for sketching and designing was seen by the superiors board which consisted of the CEO, Creative Director, Senior Fashion Designer, Senior Apparel Designer, and others for the first time, and they were awestruck to find out that a recent college graduate with no experience was able to intricately capture the company’s style and ideals of fashion in his designs. He was instantly made the Managing Director after they assessed his competitors’ work and regarded him as the best among them. He eventually got to go to the Fashion week held in Milan and helped organize one of the best fashion shows Vaunt ever put up.

Questions 

1. Did Rakesh make a wrong move by approaching Amritha Pai?

No, Rakesh made a pretty bold and strategic move by directly approaching the CEO, Amritha Pai who also founded the company, and at that moment, he was willing to risk his future at the company by owning up to the fact that he had received no working experience of a trainee Managing Director despite working for his boss Marcel for months. First impressions are extremely vital and Pai’s first impression of Rakesh seemed positive which further helped him to get the position he had always wanted.

2. Do you think Rakesh had any ulterior motives behind his sincere confession? Do you think he was right to build such an impression with his superiors?

Yes, I think Rakesh played with the psychology of his work environment since he had probably already calculated Pai’s reaction to his sincere confession. He took advantage of Marcel’s absence and exaggerated the whole situation. His ulterior motives were to maybe get ahead of his competitors as he desperately wanted to become the Managing Director which could be possible if the superiors were impressed with his personality and he achieved this through Pai. Although Rakesh failed to acknowledge and give credit to the skills and necessary experience Marcel provided him with, his designing skills got him to outshine his fellow employees. I don’t think Rakesh’s confession to impress his CEO was ideal but he did get what he wanted in the end. His work strategies and morality as a Managing Director would be better examined throughout his career by his superiors as he is responsible for major projects and since he is representing a reputed fashion brand, I don’t think he would be able to continue to complain or blame his superiors for the kind of work he would be assigned. 

3. What do you think of the working relationship between Marcel and his trainee Rakesh? Was Marcel a good boss?

Maybe one of the mistakes Rakesh made initially is that he never confronted his boss regarding the kind of work he was assigned to do which he was evidently dissatisfied with. Due to this, I sense their relationship filled with built up tension and questions Rakesh retained within himself. Unlike the assumption that Rakesh has tried to portray to his superiors, I don’t think Marcel was a bad boss. Rakesh was able to succeed in his first assignment with help of the contacts he got in touch with while working under Marcel. Surely, he had to do other tasks that were deemed unnecessary for a trainee but Marcel ensured that Rakesh was completely exposed to the fashion atmosphere and I think he was one of the reasons who prepared Rakesh to become an efficient Managing Director by understanding what happens behind the scenes and instilled many fundamental skills in him. 

4. What matters more; an employee’s skills or his intentions? What do you think were Rakesh’s intentions in this case study? 

I think a good employee must possess both these qualities however, their intentions supersedes their talents and skills as it controls the direction towards which a person uses their skills. Rakesh’s intentions were subtle yet loud, he saw Marcel’s absence as an opportunity to exaggerate his ethics as his boss and pulled the victim card onto Pai who percieved it as a brave act. He was agitated the whole time he was workign under Marcel as all his fellow trainees were exposed to various projects and he was desperate to exceed them. When time came, he decided to orchestrate the impressions his superiors had of him to become the Managing Director.