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Maria is Hired Maria is a very conscientious new hire having just…
Maria is Hired
Maria is a very conscientious new hire having just graduated as an MBA with top grades in her class. She comes from a very “connected” and influential family doing business throughout Latin America. She applied for a position at an international engineering firm that was totally unrelated to her family because she liked project management and wanted to learn to develop her expertise in a technical engineering environment.
Although she was not a typical “hire” in her new firm, the General Manager, Hardeep Prakash, was attracted to her candidacy for a variety of reasons. Among other things, he wanted to diversify the professional employees within the organization to make a better, more balanced fit with the clientele the firm wants to reach out to in the near future. Up to now, the organization provided engineering project development for Asian, Australian, Japanese, and USA markets. Hardeep’s new strategy to reach out to Latin American markets was still emerging and had not yet been shared with those on his staff. Hardeep was still working on resources needed to make a commitment to expand to this new market.
Maria Placed On The Fast Track
During the pre-hire, screening and selection process, Maria’s scores on the Work Preference Indicator revealed her to be very high in Results-Oriented Behavior (RSLT) and climbing the Career Ladder (CLAD). Both of these measures are indicators of a high achiever. She also scored high in wanting to work with Data (DATA), Mechanical things (MECH) and work independently (INDE). She has been employed at the Global Industrial Project Management (GIPM) organization for six monthsthis is her first job out of graduate school. Most of those with whom she works at GIPM are professional engineers. Maria is a young adult. She holds a dual undergraduate degree in MIS and Project Management, as well as an MBA.
When hired at GIPM, she was immediately enrolled in an accelerated program in the company as a “fast tracker” who reported directly to Hardeep. Maria is the first salaried female and first Hispanic employee in the small firm of 25 employees (all 17 of the engineers employed at GIPM are male with either English, Chinese or Japanese as their first languageall are fluent in English, as well).
Since being hired, Maria has been taken under the wing of Hardeep, to whom she reports. At her time of hire, HR designated Hardeep to be her “mentor,” and, unlike others who work at GIPM, she has had the privilege of having direct access to the “boss.” There are three section heads of engineers who also report to Hardeep. They each act as Lead Engineers with about six highly-trained engineering specialists reporting to themelectrical, environmental, computer science, and mechanical. All those working at GIPM understand the chain of command and respect it. One does not go directly to Hardeep without working through their lead engineers.
Maria’s Invitation to Lead
There is a new project that has been awarded the organization on a “no compete” basis due to an excellent relationship GIPM established with one of its customers in the past. The project is highly technical. It is termed the “Singapore Project.” Basically, it requires the design, development, and installation of a telecommunications satellite receiving unit in Singapore that will have a significantly broader bandwidth to receive and translate information for broadcasting. It will perform at least 1000 times faster than the current capability of the system that is presently in place at the Singapore site. The new capability is critical for the Singapore client and must be designed and installed very quickly. Thus, an interdisciplinary team consisting of various areas of engineering expertise within GIPM is going to be required to work on this project as a project team.
Hardeep has decided that this would be an excellent opportunity to give Maria a developmental assignment to demonstrate her administrative and project management skills. Thus, he just finished talking to her about her taking the lead on the project. When proposed to her, Maria jumped at the chance to have this added responsibility. Now she has an opportunity to lead and to make a difference.
After a brief overview of the project, expected deliverables and due dates for project completion, Hardeep gave Maria a very supportive message: “Maria, I know you can handle this. As we have a short time frame, please make a briefing for the entire team at our staff meeting next Thursdayfive working days away. I am bringing all employees, including all engineers from the field offices, so they can get on board to support you on this. You know what needs to be done. We have top technical staff. I think this will be a great way for you to learn to work with them. We will have an ‘all hands’ meeting so you can get things going immediately and establish yourself as a leader on this important project.” “Yes, Sir!” said Maria very enthusiastically.
Maria charged off to create the plan to get the project organized. She created the plan using a project planning software design she recently acquired termed: “MindQuick “(MQ). She learned to use it a few years ago when an undergraduate studying Project Management, and was assured that it was the best tool available for managing projects. (This would give her a wonderful opportunity to introduce the MQ tool to the other engineers and to Hardeep who had not been using it and did not seem aware of the tool’s existence and powerful capabilities).
Other Organizational Dynamics
As an aside, a recent employee survey spearheaded by the HR department to gauge the organization’s effectiveness revealed that employees within the organization had a very high sense of Mission (sense of organizational purpose) and Loyalty and Pride. Contrarily, their ratings of the company were lower than 29% of other engineering firms in Open Communications with their leadership, Supportive Policies of employees by the organization, Customer Relations, Change Management methods used to build understanding and support when new methods and procedures are introduced, and the effectiveness of the company’s Overall Leadership. (The latter appearing as an issue employees had with Hardeep).
The low scores did not sit well with Hardeep as he knew GIPM was very generous to its employees. The company was getting results for its investors, customers, and Board of Directors. “It is the bottom line that matters in the business we are in,” he said to himself and to others, “and the employees may be spoiled by not having enough challenges to keep them fully engaged in work rather than finding fault with the management.” For Hardeep, following the chain of command has always worked for him and the organization. All staff needs to demonstrate a commitment toward accomplishing the goals of the organization as established by top management. “Our communications have always been direct and straightforward with the employees!” he said aloud to himself and his HR director.
As one can see, Hardeep did not take the findings from the organizational effectiveness report as helpful information. As a result, the trust he had for each of his three front line managers and the engineers reporting to them declined a bit following his review of the results. (He was sent the results of the organizational assessment by the HR Director through the company’s email system along with a comment: “Oh well, we can’t please them all!”) “What is the problem with the three leads?” thought Hardeep. Privately, he also expressed this same concern to a few of the board members. “The Leads need to do more to motivate their people and quit second-guessing him.” Hardeep suspected that in the field, the Leads were running their units more like a country club than a business.
Another issue was the dislocation of the engineers from the main office. As the engineers were assigned to field operations, they were rarely at the headquarters office where Hardeep and his administrative staff and Maria spent most of their time.
The Staff Meeting One Week Later: Maria Takes The Lead
At the next week’s Thursday “all hands” meeting with all 25 in attendance, Hardeep introduced the new Singapore project and Maria to the staff and stated that Maria was going to head it up. (Interesting to the staff, Hardeep never mentioned the survey results). He noted that he has been working with her and she has the level of technical project management expertise needed to bring all on the team together to get the job done. For several of the engineers, with their being located in field offices, this was the first time they had seen Maria. Due to the lack of information about her, they thought she was an administrative assistant or a secretary. “How did she get this assignment?” they wondered.
Very quickly, Hardeep turned the meeting over to Maria standing in front of the conference table. Just as he gave her the remote to show her PowerPoint slides, Hardeep received a call on his personal cell phone from his wife which he immediately took. His wife wanted to go over the list of clothes, medicines, and the like that he wanted her to pack for him so the two of them could leave for an unannounced long weekend vacation. They were leaving by noon today (Thursday). “Honey, let me call you back in a few minutes,” he said and then left the room to make the call and talk privately. As he was going out the door, Hardeep announced to all that his son was very sick and he had to go home and might not be back for the rest of the day and if things get any worse he may not be back tomorrow, either. He then left hurriedly, with a departing statement, “Folks, please listen to Maria’s plan and make it work. We MUST have this project succeed! It is all yours, Maria. I am off to the doctor’s office to see my son!” Maria did not skip a beat. She took charge, standing in front of the conference table, she started in on her planned presentation with remote in hand.
The Grapevine Clatter
Unknown to Hardeep, his wife had called earlier and left a message with Hardeep’s administrative assistant that she needed Hardeep to call her. “Irma,” said Hardeep’s wife, ” we are ‘sneaking away’ for a little four day vacation. We are leaving at noon today, and I need Hardeep to let me know what he wants me to pack for him. Have him call me immediately.” Though Hardeep was out of the office, a few other engineers were meeting with Irma in the front office and overheard the conversation. Irma asked that if they saw Hardeep, please have him call his wife immediately, so she can pack his things before they leave today for the four-day vacation. The word spread through the office very rapidly”Hardeep is leaving for a four-day long weekend break right in the middle of the start of this new project.” They seemed a bit disgusted.
Then Something Happened to Maria’s Plan
As Maria began her presentations, there was quite a bit of non-verbal cross communications among the old-timers and other engineering staff that signaled resistance to Maria and her plan and to Hardeep, too. As Maria introduced the MQ project management software platform to those in attendance, it seemed that one engineer after another challenged why she needed to use that system when they have a system in place that has always worked fine for them. To most she seemed not to understand what they do, and was now seen as an “administrative tool” Hardeep was using to discount the engineers’ expertise. (They felt disrespected). Furthermore, most of the engineers thought Robert, Okomi, and Mike, though new to GIPM, and each working in one of the three engineering groups, were more experienced and had more seniority than Maria, and should have had the opportunity to lead a project before appointing Maria, a non-engineering, non-technical type to lead this.
So in Hardeep’s absence and with Maria’s plan becoming more and more in question, the lead engineers recognizing the potential train wreck about to hit all on their staffs, soon rejected Maria’s plan and decided that each of the three units would make a cross-functional team to take on the project. They also made clear that Robert, Okomi and Mike would have key roles working with the Lead Engineers in running the project. The entire room seemed eager to accept the Lead Engineers’ plan and action steps to get the project off and running that were agreed to before all returned to their field offices. Surely, what took place and the plan that emerged was not the plan that Maria had in mind.
This all happened so quickly that Maria became very confused. “What is my role now?” She asked herself. “What am I leading if the Lead Engineers have assumed the lead on this project?” “Where is Hardeep in all of this?” “He never warned me about these engineers and how they might react to my plan.”
New Leadership; New Directions; What Happened?
The meeting concluded by the lead engineers letting Maria know (as she was still standing up front with the remote in her hand), that they would keep her apprised of their plans and steps they were going to take to get the Singapore Project underway. They also thanked Maria for introducing the MQ project management software technology to them and expressed that MQ might be more useful in an academic environment but was not appropriate for the mission at hand. “Maria, we hope you will have time to come visit us at our field site locations one day so we can work more closely together,” said one of the Lead Engineers.
Clearly, Maria’s leadership on this team was rejected. She left the meeting, went home and did not come to work the next day (Friday), and had a very long weekend thinking and rethinking what had happened. ” What should she say to Hardeep when he returned?” “What can she do now to save face?”. “Did Hardeep set me up to fail?” she wondered. “This has just become a disaster!”
Question
How would you describe Hardeep’s style of leadership? Connect the styles you attribute to him with specific leadership behaviors he exhibited? Apply a broad array of leadership theory in your response.
use this: https://www.johnmaxwell.com/blog/the-5-levels-of-leadership1/
He was transactional and he how he still at level 1-position
Original work please i want to see different perspectives
