the triangle of death

For my summer internship I have dealt with a situation where I was in a triangle relationship between the principal agent problems. This was during the beginning part of the internship where I was required to talk to individuals about their experiences with financial planning and also try to get them to use our company for financial advising.

This situation was very difficult because it required me to not only be very engaged with the customers but also my boss because if I didn’t make any calls or contact any individuals I wouldn’t be doing a very good job for my boss. This is the same for my other agent relationship, which was my customers and I. This relationship required me to be very specific when discussing options that one could take for financial planning and also asking them what they would like to do.

This circumstance really proves to me that this was a triangle relationship because if there wasn’t adequate communication between me and my boss and me and the customers the relationship would’ve broken down and the efficiency of communication would dramatically decrease. This left me in a lot of difficult calls because sometimes a customer wouldn’t answer for a few days, which would require me to have my boss wait till I made contact with that individual. In addition, if there were difficulties with communication then I would need to deal with both parties having different thinking about how to advise what the customers decide.

However, since both parties were so involved there weren’t any situations where only one principal got their way because I worked in a service company so there wasn’t a lot of only one way transactions because especially in financial advising its hard to have the company have all say over what the customer should do any how their money should be divided up into many stocks, etc.

Obviously there can be some tension between the two principals because they are dealing with managing money, which can be a very difficult situation because obviously there are many different methods of managing money and also a lot of opportunity for fighting/arguments. I haven’t dealt with many fights but I have had some pretty extreme phone calls with people; allowing me to really see the triangle relationships between me being the agent and the two principals being the customers and the company. I also can see that there will probably be conflicts in the future and it just means that I will need to be able to make sure that the communication is effective.