Follow up River Woods Case:
Heritage Appliance Company has just announced that you are the new River Woods plant manager. You have been with the Heritage for 3.5 years as VP of Product Design & Engineering. You are 33 years old and have a degree in Engineering and an MBA from Georgia Tech University. Before Heritage you worked for 3 years as a plant operations manager for Toyota in Atlanta. You were personally chosen by the CEO of Heritage Appliance for this position. In addition to your outstanding credentials, one of the key reasons you were selected by the CEO for this position was that he felt that your short time with the company would free you from the “old way of thinking” and allow you to bring fresh ideas to this new plant organization.
One of your first management decisions was to appoint the most senior person in each department as your management team to help you develop the new plant based organizational structure. (ie. Engineering, Design, Production, Final Assembly, Quality Control etc).
To help implement all of the new operational changes, you meet with your management team once each week to discuss ideas and progress. During these meetings your management team is encouraged to express their concerns/ideas about the new operational structure. Once a month you have also included the VP of Marketing from corporate headquarters to participate in your weekly plant management meetings to help keep everyone focused on the importance of the customer and customer satisfaction.
Your observations after 4 months as River Woods Plant Manager are as follows:
You have found that the management team you selected seems very cooperative and positive about all of the changes that have taken place. At the weekly meetings you hold with them they all seem to be reasonable, supportive and cooperative of the new plant manager based organizational design. However, along with their cooperative attitude, you have observed that they also seem to be more comfortable working with and discussing whatever operational concerns they have with their former line managers in the old reporting structure at headquarters. You are starting to feel that many of your new ideas for managing the River Woods plant and improving productivity are not actually being implemented in a timely manner….. if at all.
You have also observed that your management team also enjoys a very close connection to the production workers that they manage. In spite of this close relationship with their subordinates, absenteeism on the production floor is increasing, productivity is down, and production quality standards have been consistently slipping.
You know the CEO of Heritage is concerned because he mentioned to you last week that he has heard rumors of unhappiness among the workers from other members of his executive management team. Absenteeism and customer product complaints have both risen 5 % since the new plant was opened and the new organizational structure was implemented.
You feel the cooperation that you are sensing at your weekly meetings is hiding some concerns that your management team has regarding the changes you have made and perhaps even some doubts about your overall management ability. It is obvious some things need to change.
This situation threatens to derail your career at Heritage Appliance if you can’t get it turned
around in the next few months or sooner. You obviously need to make some changes and need a
new strategy.
In 2-4 pages please address the following questions. As usual please embrace the concepts from
the text in your responses to the following questions.
1) What do you feel are the causes for the lack of management effectiveness you are experiencing?
2) Based on your qualifications and experience, what power and influence weaknesses and/or strengths do you bring to your new plant manager position? (See pages 288-298 in the text) Is there anything you can do to increase your power and influence?
3) Based on the current situation, how might you use the three influencing techniques to be most effective in getting your management team on board with you? (See pages Table 5.10 and pages 299-302).
4) What specific ideas do you have for immediate actions you might take before your next weekly managers meeting to improve communication and cooperation with your management team. What can you do to quickly turn the new plant and this career threatening situation around?