Calgary Oil Share Technologies Algoma

Calgary Oil Share Technologies

Algoma Howard had implemented cross-functional problem solving teams successfully in Alberta, but struggled to duplicate that success in Colorado. The Colorado situation failed for precisely the same reason that the Alberta situation failed -- employee buy-in. The teams that Howard created in Alberta were informal in structure and organic in nature. The two groups had not only seen the need to create the teams to work through their issues, but had also worked together to determine the structure of the teams. The teams, therefore, were the creation of the Alberta workers. The Colorado workers had no such ownership of the teams and therefore were inherently less committed to seeing those teams succeed.

Howard also ignored the culture aspects of the teams and the impact of time constraints. There are both corporate and national culture issues at play with the teams. The Canadian team was likely more oriented towards teamwork because that it more natural to Canadians than to Americans. Hockey also serves as a unifier in Canada in a way that softball in the U.S. cannot match. There may also have been cultural differences between the operations in Canada and the U.S. that need to be taken into consideration. The time constraints were another issue faced by Howard and her team. In Alberta, they were given the time and space to allow the process to unfold organically. This was not the case in Colorado, when time pressures forced them to impose the team structures on the Colorado employees. This likely only served to increase the resistance on the part of the Colorado employees, who would already have been predisposed to resisting based on the fact that they were not involved in the formation of the dispute resolution process.

Synthesis

The most important thing for me to take away from this example is the role that situation plays in this type of leadership. The same actions in one situation may fail in another situation -- it is not good enough to apply the same tactics to each situation in an unthinking manner. I have experienced this in the past, when working with difficult employees as a supervisor. Some employees have different triggers than others, so what works at motivation with one employee will be viewed by another employee with skepticism. It is important as a manager attempting to work through disputes in the workplace to understand that each situation is unique, calling for unique analysis and unique solutions. The Calgary Oil case essentially supports my own experiences with these types of situations. This reinforces the lessons I have learned, and will compel me to apply these lessons in the future when faced with disputes in the workplace.

One of the things that is important in this situation is not to become too bogged down with the details but to understand these two situations as the application of a process. While the actions in each situation were more or less the same, the process used to derive these actions was different. The Canadian process allowed the employees to become engaged and motivated, while the Colorado process did not.