Leadership Case Study

Drives for work and Development

Sally and David

MTCR is a leading company in the development and manufacturingof a broad range of custom hardware solutions. The company pridesitself and is well known for being refreshingly honest andstraightforward in its dealings with customers and employees, andin its ability to deliver difficult projects on time. Sally hasbeen a senior manager at MTCR for four years and leads a team inthe custom services area of the company. In a recent 360-degreesurvey, Sally scored above average (at the70^th percentile) in thecompetency, Drives for Results. Her report alsoindicated that her manager, peers, and direct reports saw thiscompetency as a critical one for someone in her position. Some ofthe written comments in her survey indicated that if shedemonstrated and applied this competency more often, it would havea significant positive impact on her success on the job. For thesereasons, she’s focusing her personal leadership development overthe next year on this competency.

David is one of Sally’s direct reports who has worked at MTCRfor more than nine years and whose historical performance has beenexcellent. She recently assigned David to lead a critical projectfor one of the company’s most important clients. When Sally hadassigned him the project she told him that she wanted to includesome stretch goals that would challenge his thinking. One of thosewas delivering the project on time, which she felt was achievablebut wouldn’t be easy. She also made including new approaches toproductivity and project management separate additional goals,since delivering projects on time was an area important to her andthe entire company. Sally developed a compelling list of thebenefits to the company of achieving these goals and shared herdocumentation with David. Since he would be the project manager shehad been careful to involve him in the goal-setting and to gain hiscommitment to the goals, but made it clear he was to own theproject planning and management. She checked in regularly with himduring the weeks leading up to the delivery dates. Each time sheoffered to help on the project if needed, but was assured by himthat everything was on track.

Unfortunately, the project came in late and the client was veryfrustrated. Sally moved quickly to call out David’s missedresponsibilities, wanting to be clear to him and the team that shewas holding him accountable for his actions. She interviewedDavid’s teammates to get their understanding of what happened andfind out what could have been done to prevent the failure. She’salso spent a good deal of time with David to get his perspective.While having those meetings, she realized she’d not spent enoughtime reviewing David’s project plans and learned there were severalareas that the team completely missed when they first mapped outthe project.

David has accepted Sally’s feedback and recognized and takenresponsibility for his actions. One of her greatest concerns is howto get David and the team more focused than ever on hitting theirgoals. Sally has just called a brainstorming meeting with theentire team to come up with new ways to do that. In her emailannouncing the meeting, she also acknowledged some of her failuresin the planning portion of the project.

Case Study Questions to Consider

1. “Leaderswith an existing strength in a competency that they want to developfurther, the guide provides list of Competency Companions for eachof the 16 differentiating competencies. These “cross-training”ideas are behaviors that are highly statistically correlated withthe competency the leader wants to develop into a profoundstrength”. – Assess any three leadership competencies from theabove case that needs to individual development. (4 marks)

2. Assess clearly the work and demonstrating them through heractions. (3 marks)

3. Summarize the motivational strategy Sallyemploying when dealing with David and his situation. (4marks)

4. Was not specifically mentioned in the casestudy, but might be effectively employed by Sally as part of her leadership development plan – Investigate. (4marks)

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

1 Sally should focus on developing the compet encies of communication collaboration and accountabili... View the full answer