Working in Teams at Brown-Forman

This week at Brown-Forman, I got to sit in on meetings and start working on my project concerning improving business proposal presentations. One of the meetings was with the event planner and general manager of Professional Bull Riding (PBR), Australia and two Brown-Forman employees from the Sydney office, Rachel Penny and Kate Adams. One of PBR’s top sponsors is Jack Daniel’s and the meeting was set up to go over the current contract and where improvements could be made. The problem that I saw was how Rachel treated Kate in the meeting with PBR and even beforehand when they were preparing. Rachel is the national sponsorship and events manager and Kate use to work on a contract where she reported to Rachel. Now that Kate has a full-time position as a sponsorship and events executive, she works closely with Rachel but is not her assistant.

During the meeting, Rachel would tell Kate to take note of something and to find a file that Rachel needed to show PBR multiple times. While these are small things, how Rachel was talking to Kate came off as belittling, like Rachel was too busy to do that, but Kate clearly had the time. If Rachel asked Kate to help out in the meeting, that would be one thing, but treating Kate like her job is less important than Rachel’s is very different.

I believe the issue here is that Rachel is viewing situations as, “This will help me” if Kate does this, instead of “this will help the team” if Kate can help with this. If Rachel makes this switch, it should show Kate that she’s working for a team that really wants help her do her best. It should improve how Kate views her relationship with Rachel.