Management
Assessing the Many Management Challenges George Faces
Having stepped into Stevenson Company transportation department as its new supervisor, George is quickly overwhelmed by a department in disarray, chaotically operating without any leadership or guidance. The major management issues George faces is predicated on the lack of clarity regarding roles, authority and organization structure and clarity of performance expectations. In short, the management issues George faces are what happens when senior management abdicates leadership of a given area of a business, allowing personal agendas and resentment to ester instead of implementing clear performance expectations. The lack of willingness to change and improve is more attributable the managers of dysfunctional teams than the teams themselves (James, Wooten, Dushek, 2011).
The first and most significant management issue is getting the transportation department integrated back into the company. The many symptoms of its malaise and dysfunctional nature can be attributed to its lack of leadership and intently. When organizational teams lack a sense of identity and meaning, the tendency to pursue individual agendas and ideas becomes a higher priority than accomplishing the goals of a department or organizational unit (Jaques, 2012). This is what's happening with the many symptoms of a department gradually disintegrating. Everyone is thinking about themselves first, not even considering the mission and objectives of the department itself. Left unchecked there will be a degradation in service and the broader company's financial performance and customer relationships will seriously suffer. All of these external problems will become even more severe and lead to the Stevenson Company gaining a reputation for unreliable,...
There is no accountability for performance, and no set of specific steps for escalating performance problems with employees. Lacking accountability and transparency, departments will degenerate into a series of personal agendas, preferences and conflicts that had been manageable in the past flourish into debates over who owns what specific task or area (Kovjanic, Schuh, Jonas, 2013). At Stevenson Company there is no accountability and transparency of performance for each employee, and as a result chaos is beginning to spread. There is also no active system in place to escalate performance and morale-related issues. This contributes to the lack of morale as work groups that pervades the transportation department today.
In terms of priorities, George needs to first focus on getting his department connected or integrated back to the rest of the company. Today is completely disconnected, lacking any sense of purpose as part of the Stevenson Company. His immediate staff, the assistant manager, two route managers, and a dispatcher need to meet with George and his boss, the VP of Operations, to define the goals and objectives for the department. Instead of allowing these meetings to descend into gripe sessions, George and his boss need to work with this team to define goals, objectives and guidelines for performance. They will need to in essence reconstruct the department from the ground up. The highest priority is to get the department connected back to the company again.
The second-highest priority is to establish minimum levels of performance for drivers and create individual performance programs for each. As there is little if any meaning…
