Experience About Unsuccessful Leadership

Instance in which leadership was not successful

Outline
1. Introduction
2. The Situation
3. The Problem
4. Conclusions
5. Leadership and Motivation

Introduction
As owner of a consulting company which started to work ten years ago only with two workers (its partners), who in those days had to develop each one of the projects that was sold, I had to confront severalsituations in which I had to assume the leadership of groups formed by people who worked for our clients. Some of those projects consisted of implementing world class tools in which my role was to manage and control the projects. A lot of people (project managers, key users, users, IT support, senior consulters, junior consulters, programmers, among others) work in these kind of projects. The amount ofpeople depends on the number of processes that are implemented in the world class tool. Also, the duration of these projects is related to the number and complexity of the processes and it can fluctuate between 7 months and 2 years.

The Situation
At one point I had to assume the management in a SAP implementation project for a logistic Chilean company called SAAM. The goal was to implementeach one of the organization´s processes in the world class tool (administration, accounting, finance, controlling and every logistic process). At the beginning, we planned to finish it in 18 months and we assigned 150 people including users and consulters. Of course, we had to divide the project into groups and to designate some headquarters to control them.
When we were in the middle of theproject, it began to move more slowly than we expected. In order to correct the delay, I gave the instruction that every single headquarters had to give me every day a little report indicating planning tasks or activities which had not been made. My idea was to detect problems and to help the groups to solve every issue daily. Of course, the latter would demand extra time for groups whom had presentedissues.

The Problem
Some headquarters interpreted that they would receive a punishment if they reported issues. For this reason they gave that message to their groups (users and consulters). The latter brought consequences, key users were unmotivated and some of them left the project because they were really stressed and in addition they would be punished.
Fortunately, we noted that theinterpretations were incorrect and we took corrective actions in time.

Conclusions
Probably the problem was generated because of different causes, the following among them:
Firstly, I used to communicate the ideas only to headquarters and I was not near people who were under the supervision of headquarters.
Secondly, I gave an order without sharing and communicating the idea’s spirit correctly.Although the order was presented with details, headquarters made their own interpretation of it. As Smircich and Morgan (1982) said “the leader has a specific figure-ground relation in mind in engaging in action; other members of the situation construct their own interpretation of this action” Leadership: The Management of Leadership (p.262). The understanding of the messages is crucial so that theleaders can put their ideas to work. Therefore, leaders must validate that their messages are received in the same way they expect by using methods oriented to minimize discrepancy between them and their followers.
Finally, the people who were part of the groups were exposed to different formal and informal messages and for that reason uncertainty appeared and they became unmotivated. As Grint(2000) said, “The imagination of followers is also relevant because they have to interpret events, gestures, speeches, texts, and so on to mean something similar to that which the leader implies. There cannot be a way of ensuring that followers interpret a leader's actions or words in precisely the same way that the leader intends” The Arts of Leadership (p.18). In order to minimize this effect,...