Leadership 101

In keeping with the theme from my last post on setting up a scenario and asking how you would respond, I have a new, real life scenario for you. I’ve changed the names and the specifics of the incident to protect the guilty party.

Here’s the set up. Many of the members of your executive staff don’t communicate well with each other, let alone others beneath…I’m sorry…at lower levels of the organization. Imagine that your employee has received an email from one of these executive managers that begins like this:

“Understand that I am way past pissed off on this one.”

Point number one: The employee who received this email reports to you. You are not in this executive’s chain of command, and therefore neither is this employee.

Oh, did I mention that this executive copied the entire leadership team, along with others down stream, to spread his good cheer?

Point number two: The contents of the email go on to berate this employee for their ignorance in making their request. It also does a good job of making the employee look like an idiot.

Point number three: The, dare I call him, gentlemen who sent this email, never bothered to pick up the phone and call the employee to ask any clarifying questions before sending the email. Nor did he call you, his peer, to ask about the situation.

Point number four: The facts in the email were WRONG. The executive had not bothered to communicate with other members of the team who already had the information, understood the project, and were well informed of what was happening.

Question: What would you do in this scenario?

This entry was posted on September 27, 2010 at 16:32 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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