Monday, May 4, 2020

Leadership Development Case Studies




Case Study 1: 

You have been appointed as a leader to a fresh department established in a healthcare product. What will be the initial few steps as a leader for the first 15 days in your appointment? 

This is a new startup company. CEO has a lot of ambition from your department. 

Once 15 days is over, you got an invitation from your sales team that there could be a million-dollar order in a pipeline for a software solution development. They involve you in their initial potential software product development dialogue. 

What would be your steps as a leader? As a presentation to others, what you would be suggesting to them? 

Let us first forward to this condition. After 1 year, your department has 100 + team members, and you are the leader for all of them. 

You got an invitation from a potential company in the health care department to take over and integrate the same with your team. As a leader of the department, what is your understanding and what you will be sharing in the department town hall meeting? 


Case Study 2: 

You are an associate director in a business line that provides assistance in Business Transformation to the whole enterprise. You report directly to the Center, head of the enterprise. The whole organization is going through a cost optimization drive. And also, the corporation is experiencing severe attrition. Many talented team members have left the organization. 

You are under immense pressure not able to spend time with your 2 managers who are managing the whole program in your Transformation business line. 

These 2 managers are here with the organization for a long time and you are comparatively fresh. There was a constant accusation that your department is not competent to help the organization in the overall transformation process. The transformation is remarkably slow and not efficient. 



The managers are sensing that staff are becoming overworked as everyone takes on increased responsibilities due to significant staff turnover. The staff has also reported that your “glass-half-empty” communication style leaves them feeling disheartened. In addition, you have not shared budgets with your managers, so they are having difficulty appropriately allocating work to staff. You also recognize that you have not obtained ample information from the finance department to complete the budgets. The finance department said they have sent you all the information they have available. 



As the staff becomes distressed, the managers are becoming frustrated. They feel like they are unable to advocate for their staff or solve problems without key information like the departmental budget as well as vision. You sense that your managers also not so competent in the transformation work. Most of the time you got the report that both of these managers are conflicting with each other. 



You as a leader 

· What steps could be taken to strengthen staff confidence? 

· How can you most effectively use both management and leadership skills in your role as associate director? What combination of the two do you think would work best in this setting? 

· Which leadership style do you think a leader would need to be adequate in this situation? 


Case study 3: 

Prasad is functioning as a department manager; he was working with this company for the last 10 years. He has two decades of overall IT experience. He has developed himself from the bottom up to this department manager position by performing hard work. He is a remarkable people-friendly individual and most of the team members appreciate his management style. He understands the pain of the team members. He supports them whenever demanded. He has many managers reporting to him. Some are efficient and some are not so competent. But Prasad mentors them periodically. In Recent major re-org, Prasad was baffled about what will happen to his position as the whole organization has suffered considerable transformations. He was assigned for a new digital transformation program with 50 team members. On an earlier occasion, he was managing 200 people. 

a) What will be his motivation or drive to perform better? 

b) What stakeholder management he will do in a digital product? 

c) What should be his initial few steps once he commenced this unique role? 

d) How he will safeguard his success? 

e) What you would have done when you are in his situation? 


Case study 4: 



Niraj was the project manager, he was performing great for his project and all stakeholders acknowledge his hard work. He was consistently managing his project better and his team members also recognize it. He has remarkably efficient network skills with the top. He understands the domain. In new organizational transformation, he has promoted to a new business line lead. He has been in charge now to define the product strategy with 120 team members. He has never administered more than 30 individuals in his career. 

He is responsible for new product budgeting and sales as well. 

a) What he should do differently? 

b) What new thing does he need to know? 

c) What you would have done when you are in his situation? 


Case study 5: 



Alok was the center head. He was one of the distinguished young individuals to run this center. He is a dynamic and quick learner. He was managing 400 people and driving a major multimillion-dollar portfolio in a retail unit. He is a hard worker and a workaholic person. In recent turmoil, his center got dissolved and fragmented into many minor units. He has got a global role with 120 team members to establish a Dev sec and ops team first time in the organization. He had many competent managers who were his close company. In the new structure, he has not given any of the mature people. 

He obtained an all-new set of team members from a distinct company that recently been acquired. 

a) What will be the few challenges he will have to focus on? 

b) What will be his strategy? 

c) What you would have done when you are in his situation? 


Case study 6: 


Kannan is an extremely poor project manager but someway in front of the stakeholders he managed to carry out the show by which Stakeholder was extremely pleasant, He was managing testing projects and it was one of the mission-critical projects. He used to market his deliverables extremely well, however small it may be. He used to take many initiatives across the organization, and everyone knows him. He used to take many training sessions and CSR activities. 

There was massive program development work showed, 120 individuals, 3 various department requires to build this program/product. 

He has been appointed as an in charge of this large program as everyone knows him, but he does not have done such monumental work before. 


a) What do you think he should do to be first considered? 

b) How he will establish he got the appropriate individuals on the bus? 

c) As he was dealing with 20 individuals, what he should be working to deal with 120 people? 

d) What you would have done when you are in his situation? 

e) Most of the team members are incompetent in this company what he should be doing to safeguard delivery? 

Case study 7: 

Balaji was managing global product, development teams. There was a competitive product being developed in another corner of the world in the same company. 

They are marginally varied offering in nature. Most of the time customer was perplexed as both of this product team participate in sales bidding and demo work. Balaji was consistently in conflict with one more global manager to demonstrate whose product should remain and which one to drop. This tussle is ongoing and most of the top leaders realize. All the top leaders choose to preserve their buddies on the payroll. As these products have been around for the last few years. 

Balaji is leading this distributed product development team, and he is retaining the budget. These teams are distributed in 5 different geographical locations. It has developed into challenging to continue this product due to diverse issues, product issues, people issues, cost issues, license issues, a political issue, internal departmental conflicts, customer issues, etc. 

Team morale is down at the highest level 

a) What is the next step for Balaji? 

b) When can he get the promotion? 


Case study 8: 

Dilip is a recent college pass out. He did 2 MS in a different subject. He did one internship with one of the prominent firms, and one of his ideas accepted the best idea award and select for a product to be developed with immediate effect. The company where he used to work as an intern, they grant him for a full-time job for the same product development. He started functioning as a project manager for product development. 

With him 4 architects all are more than 25 years’ experience, 2 product managers, and 30 team members, most of them are 15 yrs. of experience. 

What do you think Dilip should be doing as a leader? He is young, smart, quick to learn, bright but fresh to the software product development world! 

How he will get along with all these experience personalities? 

How you will ensure he gets acknowledgment for all these team members? 

How he should be driving the whole show? 

Should he go back to earn a management degree? 


Case study 9: 


Shilpa is a technical lead. She is a district topper and extremely bright developer. The organization where she was working, they got a development assignment that they were seeking for some time. But the Organization could not pick up it owing to the resource competency issue. The client was willing to pick up a few developers as an on-site developer. Shilpa was among them. She has gone there at client location for 6 months assignment; it was a c++ work for large-scale product development in the Medical system. There were 25 experienced team members working, Shilpa was among them. She turns into an on-site coordinator after 6 months. She got extensions for 2 years and further work started showing up to India. There were few more team members who started traveling to an on-site location for development. Shilpa used to conduct the weekly call with offshore location, Every 6 months she used to travel to India and take classes. After 2 years, she came back and decided to marry and relocate to America. Sharath will succeed in Shilpa's role and will take up the on-site coordinator role. 

a) What do you expect Sharath to do? 

b) How do you think Sharath will take care of business expansion and business continuity 

c) What action plan Sharath should have? 

Case study 10: 

Narshimma is a Transformation lead for the Agile Transformation department in an organization. He has received the target to transform the team with an absolute deadline from the top. He has got 75% contractor and 25% full-time employed to run the show. The transformation budget was extremely tight and there was an abundance of tracking to demonstrate the outcome. There was immense pressure on the staff to show the progress. There were daily calls, weekly calls, monthly calls to indicate the progress. The staff is having an internal call with global colleagues. There was a speed pressure, delivery pressure everywhere. Team members were collapsing and Narshimma also pressuring as from the top also individuals are asking Narshimma to produce development. 

One day in one of the global meet up, few team members complain again Narshimma. The global leaders took prompt action and they eliminate Narshimma from the lead position and nominate a new person. 

The new person does not know anything about the transformation program 

a) What do you want the new person to do so that healthy environment prevailed in the department 

b) How to boost team morale?

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