Week 5 – Leader Member Exchange

During this week, I was able to see how my supervisor connected and worked with her followers. While she does not have a direct leadership role over a team, her role as Director of Sustainability permeates all areas of the business. Over the course of my internship, she worked with departments such as Market Research, Marketing, Strategic Sourcing, and Merchandising, in order to push sustainability initiatives. Because of her status as director, she formally has a leadership role when interacting with these different departments. However, she makes her interactions with these teams relationship-based, especially during this week.

A particular initiative that my supervisor and I worked on was for a consumer take-back program, where customers of Sephora can bring empty, hard to recycle containers back to any Sephora store and receive a discount on their next purchase. In order to get this initiative up and running, she had to first go to our CEO, Jean Andre (which is interesting, because they refer to him very informally as JAR). In her meeting, she was the follower and tried to negotiate past her job description to take on this new project. Since she is new in her role, I would identify them in the acquaintance phase, where JAR was ready to give her new challenges and my supervisor was looking to take on more challenging roles that would benefit both parties. He gave her the go ahead, and she then talked to the Marketing and Merchandising teams.

While she was the leader in the next conversation with marketing, she was not the expert in either of these fields, and had never had a formal conversation with these individuals (except via email). She was also at a disadvantage socially because she has never had the chance to meet anyone in person, as she was hired after the pandemic started. Because of these barriers, she and the head of marketing were in stage one of LMX, where their exchange was lower quality and the follower has more self-interest. I was a part of this Zoom call, and I saw how unwilling the head of marketing was to continue the conversation with my supervisor. Instead, she redirected her to the market research team, since she was busy and did not have a strong relationship to give her time to helping my supervisor.

These two very different exchanges were a great example of different phases as represented by LMX theory. My boss was an interesting lens to view this theory through, since she has a unique relationship with everyone that she interacts with in our organization due to the pandemic.