Neeha Mujeeb
Mid-Career Master in Public Administration, Candidate May 2025 at Harvard Kennedy School
Mid-Career Masters in Public Administration Candidate at Harvard Kennedy School Author of Climate Middle East https://climateme.substack.com/ Support GLEAC, Climate Asia, Led By Foundation GRI...
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- Public Sector Innovation: Strategies for effective governance transformation
- ESG Impact Assessment: Evaluating sustainability in organizations
- Climate Strategy Development: Frameworks for addressing climate challenges
- Leadership in Public Administration: Fostering change through effective governance
- Community Engagement for Social Change: Empowering diverse voices in decision-making.
Meet the mentor
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blog articles
Tricky Workplace Situation Handled
- Kim didn't technically do anything wrong. She stuck to the store's policy and script on how to deal with returns. However, since this was a recurring customer and one that was clearly upset, Kim could have engaged with her a bit more.
- Kim could have asked a few more questions to understand why the customer wasn't happy with the bag. She could have explained why the store has such a policy e.g. it makes it difficult for them to resell it. She could have also provided some other options to placate the customer such as providing some store credit or offering a replacement at a discount.
- - Allowing the customer to 'vent' fully - Not getting defensive. Always starting with acknowledging their frustration - Finding other ways to 'compensate' them and retain their loyalty
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- Think of a friend who is usually positive and happy but you see them react negatively to something. When that happens, your first reaction is usually to think that this is out of character for them, let's cut them some slack and see how we can make them happy again. Think of the customers in the same way. Assume that when someone is upset, it is out of character for them and find out what is driving that and how you can help.
- Communication and Recognition are key tools that can help in this situation. Some potential initiatives to consider: - Host a 1 day offsite to communicate the vision and host team building exercises to re-energize the team - Set up bi-weekly forums at different levels of the organization - executive directors, directors, managers - where each level of the organization can meet for 1/2 hour and discuss major projects they are working on, or discuss problems and how to tackle them across silos - Promote those who you know are taking on more tasks either formally through the organization or by giving them access to special incentives such as training programs, personal coaching sessions with professional career coaches, etc. - Celebrate successes at every possible opportunity to increase morale, especially celebrating those that required cross-department collaboration
- We allow employees to set their own deadlines given what they have on their plate. This allows people to manage their own time with the given priorities and allows for enough buffer time to be built in to create something comprehensive and good quality. It also encourages people to take ownership of tasks and drive them in their own management style.
- When I struggled with managing stress, I realized it was usually because I overestimated how long a task would take to complete. As an exercise, for a week, I recorded how long each task from my to do list took to complete and it has helped me better manage my anxiety as I could see that most tasks on average took about 15 - 20 mins to complete and were not as time-consuming as I thought they would be if I just focused for that time. This helped me set better goals for the day that were achievable based on the time I had and the type of task I had to complete. Now I break up my day with shorter tasks completed early in the morning to create a feeling of achievement, longer tasks left for later in the day, with breaks built in.
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