Page 117 - The extraordinary leader

94 • The Extraordinary Leader

late showing up in the morning, assignments were often not completed on
time, and the workplace showed an attitude of “We don’t care.” John started
out his tenure as a new manager by interviewing each employee. He took care-
ful notes and was very interested in the career aspirations of each individual.
He also asked questions about each person’s areas of strength and develop-
mental needs. He quickly found out that this was a highly creative and tal-
ented group but they lacked a clear mission and purpose. They had been
responding to engineering requests from manufacturing but were not looking
at long-term improvements that would take them out of daily fire-fighting
activities and allow them more time to work on major innovations.
Two weeks after John took over as manager, he planned a one-day off-site
meeting. During the off-site meeting, he worked on team building and clarifi-
cation of the group mission and objectives. The group gave John some chal-
lenging assignments. They indicated that they could not accomplish long-term
engineering changes unless he could get manufacturing off their backs. The
previous manager had simply accommodated all requests from manufacturing,
regardless of their priority. John began to realize that the best way to gain the
support of his group was to manage the group’s priorities and goals with internal
customers. His next task was to meet with manufacturing managers in order to
gain support for the group’s goals and plans. This was much more difficult. The
manufacturing organization believed that it should direct the activities of engi-
neering. The problem was that their priorities and problems changed daily, and
the result was that concerted effort on solving major problems never occurred.
John helped these leaders to see that if engineering could focus their efforts on
a few top priorities, everyone’s job would be easier. For the next five months John
worked on relationships both within his group and with manufacturing. He made
a concerted effort to recognize the accomplishments of group members. He
started to hold regular staff meetings. He had the group participate in setting
priorities and deciding on target goals. Several members of the group with
behavior and performance problems were put on notice by John because they
continued to show up late for work and miss delivery deadlines.
As John reviewed his leadership assessment results, he was generally
pleased. His results were substantially above the norm on all competencies.
As John worked through the data with his coach, one of his most positive areas
was technical knowledge. The coach, knowing John did not have an engi-
neering background, found that very unusual. “How do you explain this high
score in technical knowledge?” the coach asked John. John shook his head.
“I can’t explain it. I am not an engineer. Everyone in this group knows more