There are numerous factors that make managers and leaders successful in the business world. One of the most important aspects of business leadership is allowing communication to flow up and down the chain of command; while not every idea is implemented, it is important that employees understand their concerns will be listened to in order to maintain a successful work environment. Leaders, therefore, build a transparent environment and make themselves available to their employees and other high level business people. In addition, business leaders must work on relationship building between other business leaders in order to foster good relationships and help increase cooperation between other businesses. This will go a long way towards ensuring the success of the overall business and its mission.
Business leaders are directly responsible for determining the culture of the business. CEOs set the corporate mission and the culture at a macro level; project managers are responsible for setting the local culture. Businesses should seek to have a culture that makes employees excited to go to work on workdays; getting there can be difficult. Setting the culture requires that business leaders set the tone and organize the structure, which means that the reporting structure and chain of command denotes importance and can reflect the business’ main goals and aspirations (Say, 2013). In addition, the business leader should learn to delegate. This will reduce the need to micromanage employees which is detrimental to business culture. In addition, delegation facilitates that action is appropriately taken, as one person cannot run every aspect of a business (Articles, n.d.). Judy would later demonstrate this by allowing her project managers to be able to work closely with contractors to patch the relationship between the government and them, which is a critical example of the positive effects of delegation. Delegation also helps train employees and facilitate motivation in them, as their success and career is directly tied to the authority that they now carry. Thus, delegation should be considered a useful tool in a business leader’s tool belt.
Business leaders should also take the time to visit the troops. This means traveling and visiting with all members of the organization as much as possible in order to understand employees’ unique views on what makes company culture (Katzenboch, 2012). This is a successful business practice because employees and management will feel valued by the company, as their opinions are being considered for the betterment of the company as a whole. Business leaders also need to match the strategy of the business to its culture. If a leader proposes a new strategy that will clash with the culture of the business, the overall strategy is unlikely to succeed.
Business leaders also need to understand when to formally intervene and when to informally intervene. This is definitive of the business leader, and such things like “praise in public, punish in private” become synonymous with the type of leader that an individual wishes to be. Leaders must understand what constitutes a serious threat to company strategy and its culture, and understand how to remove the problem respectfully and professionally. This will demonstrate to other employees how the company’s culture is represented in management, and likely go a long way in increasing employee satisfaction. Business leaders also must monitor the cultural change that occurs within an organization, as it is their responsibility to affect and change it.
Judy had a huge success in changing the culture of the program from its lowest level. She implemented a wide range of policies and procedures while under extreme pressure from the base commander and employees regarding the much needed layoffs that had to occur as a result of the Air Force seeking to cut unnecessary costs.
Judy was surprisingly successful in maintaining a level of trust in the organization while pursuing a goal of downsizing, which is remarkable considering the situation she was in. Entrepreneur Magazine lists some of the biggest mistakes leaders make when downsizing, and the two biggest ones are “communicating too infrequently and failing to handle layoffs with care” (Todrin, 2011). The latter is extremely important when laying employees off, because it shows you care about all employees and their future which is vital to increasing the wellbeing and happiness of employees. One of the most effective ways of doing this is to help employees find alternate jobs after being laid off, which is exactly what Judy promised to do on her first day. This helped instill a feeling of caring at the office, as Judy was sent there specifically to lay people off, yet her actions helped demonstrate that she genuinely cared about the workers.
Judy also did something very brave for the tension that was prevalent in the office: she allowed the employees to vent their frustration using notecards which were anonymously given. This allowed Judy to assess the attitude in the workplace, and how the individual workers felt. This would have been absolutely worthless if Judy had not also implemented policies to heighten trust and ensure that the workers were being listened to. The senior management team issued a report when each idea was implemented, and it significantly increased the trust of the employees during the first few rounds of layoffs.
Another key way that Judy increased the trust of stakeholders in her leadership ability was the leadership she demonstrated to her upper management teams. The upper management of the program had developed a report that showed how expensive the program was and where it needed to cut the deadweight from; previous team leaders had apparently ignored the report, and it remained stuck inside of the desk of the Chief Financial Officer’s desk until Judy arrived to take their place. Judy was very responsive to the report, and took it very seriously, which helped increase the organizational leadership’s image of Judy. No longer would they have to deal with a leader who fought back against changes, but they could look forward to the goals of the mission being achieved by a trustful and professional leader. The Chief Engineer of the program also understood that Judy was going to make serious, necessary changes to the program to help it run smoother and more efficiently. The Chief Engineer is clearly someone you want to have on your side in a program like this, and Judy’s leadership style was apparent to him very early on.
Judy did several things to gain the trust of project members. The first major thing was standing up to the base commander when he attempted to tear Judy down in a public setting. The base commander was clearly worried about the stakeholders involved in the program; however, he did so by attempting to use peer pressure and his influence as commander of the base to have her change course. The base commander even attempted to go to her superiors in Washington to have her removed, and the answer was no. Judy helped gain the confidence of her project managers because she was resolute in the face of opposition. The fact that she remained so committed to her goals and the overall mission surely helped sway her project managers into believing that Judy was deeply devoted towards this specific outcome. Thus, courage is a very important trait that demonstrated to Judy’s project managers her devotion.
Judy furthered the relationship with her project managers by helping sure up the relationship with the contractors, who were directly responsible for ensuring the positive development of the missile. Judy implemented a mirror exercise where senior leadership on both sides took a guess at understanding the main problems each side faced, and there was a considerable mismatch resulting in very different expectations. Project managers were allowed to seek and implement their own measures to fix the issues and challenges with each individual contractor. For example, the CFO Dennis Mallik visited the financial officers of Raytheon to understand their needs and what they were focused on. Mallik was also a great leader, but it was Judy’s willingness to allow initiative take place that helped foster trust between her and her subordinates. Judy continued to foster this with other important team members who helped change the organizational culture from the inside with their ideas and innovation, such as Col. Wendy Massielo’s coffee mug idea that helped generate attention and understanding of the new direction the organization was taking. By allowing other leaders in the organization to delegate and assume responsibility for the cultural and strategic direction of the organization, Judy helped instill trust in her subordinates while maintaining her leadership over them, which was critical for enabling the future success of the operation.
Another key thing that helped Judy to instill trust with project managers was working with the contractor’s to reduce company employment size. This may sound a bit farfetched, but a meeting with Chuck Anderson, who was the head of the AMRAAM program at Hughes Air Force Base in Tucson. Chuck Anderson was also working closely with project managers, and they needed to reduce the size of their office as well. Judy delivered the news and the new numbers of employees that the organization would expect to have. This understandably did not go over well with the employees working out of Tucson, but it demonstrated Judy’s willingness to do the job, even the dirty bits, such as instituting layoffs and delivering the bad new herself.
Judy took several actions to increase the reliability of the program in the eyes of the government, contractors, and even the employees. She worked hard to remove the bureaucracy in the program to help the contractors better interact with the project, something that earned the respect of the various contracting groups. These contractors often complained that it would take months to be legally allowed to change a single bolt on the missile design. This delay created considerable waste in the government sector and the contractor’s sector, as forcing them to wait damaged their capacity to earn income. Judy reduced this by removing some of the red tape surrounding the entire operation, for which the contractors were very grateful. She also rewrote the specifications which helped reduce the deadweight loss, and she identified this issue on day one.
Judy also helped reform the concept of Total Systems Performance Responsibility, or TSPR. TSPR reflects the responsibility of the contractor to ensure that they maintain full responsibility for the maintenance of the product, and that the capabilities of the missile is maintained during its life cycle. Essentially, TSPR allowed the contractors to focus on building and developing the best products on the market, while doing it at the most cost efficient way. Traditionally, the government and the contractors distrusted each other, as the government believed contractors only wanted to make a huge profit and the contractors believed the government wanted them to only breakeven. Judy, however, helped change this mentality by focusing on TSPR. Judy did this by reducing the time it took to get new specs approved, and by helping understand the needs of the contractors. Judy ensured that the contractors were directly responsible for the maintenance of the missiles, as they knew the missile better than anyone else. This allowed the government to save a considerable amount of money, as they had been forced to maintain expensive supply depots, while the contractors did not have as large an expense in that regard. Judy then eliminated the turn-around-time requirement for missiles, which would then help the contractors focus on fixing what needed it.
The last significant step Judy took in ensuring a good relationship with the contractors is she maintained an aura of transparency. When her long-term pricing strategy broke down with the contractors after her superiors denied her request, she communicated with them about it and let them know it would not work out. The contractors responded well and it implied that they were all on the same team. Judy’s ability to be open and honest with them allowed for a sense of trust because it broke down the significant barriers between the government organization and the contractors. It became apparent that everyone was simply seeking to maximize efficiency as a team. Thus, Judy had a long term impact on the success of the government/contractor relationship.
Leadership development plans are paramount to establishing a vision and a strategy on how to accomplish it. Judy’s leadership development plan should be based on several core concepts. The first is to continue taking on advanced leadership roles. This will allow her to gain experience and grow under pressure from new and challenging environments, which will increase her capacity as a leader. Judy should recognize her core values, because that will provide her with an overall sense of direction and help her decide what type of leader she will become (Lynch, 2015). Judy also needs to identify her key traits, from moral values all the way to leadership skills. This is very important in the leadership world because self-examination is very important in developing, provided an individual can recognize the flaws he/she has. She also, therefore, must analyze what other people think about her because often times, these views may be more honest than her own. Lastly, it is very important that Judy set goals for herself and her future, and draw up a five year plan to achieve those goals, or a ten year plan. Judy has already shown her success and leadership potential, and she will continue to go a long way.
References:
Articles. The Impact of Delegation on Management Decision Making. Retrieved from ArticleSNG, http://articlesng.com/impact-delegation-management-decision-making/
Katzenboch, J. (2012, July 1). Cultural change that sticks. Retrieved August 16, 2016, from Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2012/07/cultural-change-that-sticks
Lynch, P. (2015). 8 steps to creating a personal leadership development plan. Retrieved August 16, 2016, from Thunderbird Edu, http://leadership.thunderbird.edu/blog/8-steps-to-creating-a-personal-leadership-development-plan
Say, M. (2013, October 4). How to build A great company culture. Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2013/10/04/how-to-build-a-great-company-culture/
Todrin, D. (2011, July 27). The Six biggest downsizing mistakes. Retrieved August 16, 2016, from Managing Employees, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220074
