Introduction
This report is about the Satara team, under the leadership of their team leader Gary Pinto is in a race against time in an effort to develop a very small and light imaging system that can operate from a satellite in space to digitally document environmental threats such as a dramatic increase in water and air pollution as well as coastal erosion.
The team is made up of Gary Pinto who is the team leader, David Benett and Ira Lovas who are senior mechanical engineers, Steve Rowling as the senior electrical engineer, Jean Mahoney as the electrical engineer, Katherine Baxter as the mechanical engineer and Derek Delaney who is the assistant mechanical engineer.
There was generally very little communication among the team members. Some of the key team members were constantly in conflict with each other and were largely responsible for the lack of cohesion among all team members.
The main characters who are responsible for most of the team’s woes were their senior mechanical engineers. By virtue of their wealth of experience in the field of mechanical engineering, they had been charged by the team leader with sharing leadership effort of designing the mechanical aspects of the imaging system that the team was developing.
Ira Lovas’ approach to design was conservative as well as methodical which contrasted that of David Benett which was not only unorthodox but came together with his adamant style of presenting ideas. Ira resented David for all second-guessing his decisions and abilities while David on the other hand felt that his ideas were far more superior to Ira’s. The inability of these two fellows to see eye to eye is the genesis of the woes that Satera team finds itself in. The bad blood between two key team members meant that no team member wanted to be dragged into their seemingly endless egoistic battles.
In this report, we are going to try and get to the bottom of Satera’s woes. We will have to find out why there is an abundance of conflict, lack of cohesion, and little communication in Satera. We are also going to explore the different ways of addressing all these emergent issues. Finally, we will recommend the best way possible to solve these issues.
Body
The crux of all the problems that Satera team is facing lies squarely with their two senior-most mechanical engineers. David and Ira, who were charged with the responsibility of sharing the leadership of developing the mechanical aspect of the imaging system, seem unable to see eye to eye.
Lovas, who is highly respected and regarded because of his wealth of experience, favors a conservative as well as the methodical approach in his work. This approach stands in stark contrast to Benett’s which can be regarded conservatively as unorthodox. Benett is also known to be adamant as well as aggressive when presenting his ideas, a fact which not only peeves his arch-nemesis Lovas but also other team members as well. Another fact about him that further alienates him from his workmates is the fact that he considers his work to be far superior to that of Lovas. But what ticks Lovas off than anything else about Benett is the fact that he never misses an opportunity to second guess Lovas’ decisions or ideas.
If there is no teamwork, it only follows that cohesion among the team members will also be deficient. The whole team is rendered unable to function as a unit and instead, they operate as a fragmented ragtag collection of individuals. These developments have had detrimental implications on the goals of the team and that of the company at large.
Some of the members of the team expressed their respect to the two senior-most engineers but went ahead to express their displeasure in the same breath of having to work together with them. Katherine fell short of faulting Gary’s leadership skills when she said that no one wanted to face the consequences of choosing one engineer’s design over the other. What she was implying, in reality, was the fact that Gary seemed to have no answer to the challenge that faced the team in terms of getting Lovas and Benett to work together harmoniously.
Gary was known to be an effective team leader of many previous teams. He also had a wide range of attributes that made him the most suitable person to lead a team such as the one he had been charged to lead. Some of the attributes that made him a good leader were his ability to praise his team members for their strengths and to criticize them constructively for their weaknesses. His most treasured attribute was that of people skills. He had been able to address interpersonal conflicts not through disciplinary action but through holding separate discussions with warring parties and a follow-up discussion in the company of both the warring factions and get them to read from the same page (Amabile & Schatzel, 18).
Ironically, it was in this domain that Gary was currently experiencing seemingly insurmountable problems. He was hopeful though, that his people skills would enable him to mend Lovas’ and Benett’s working relationship more so because he had managed to develop and maintain sound relationship with both of them.
So far, his usual methods of conflict resolution had failed to yield any desirable results. Leadership is about influencing other people to accept your will and Gary was at his wit’s end concerning influencing Lovas and Benett to accept his will. He had ordered both Benett and Lovas to each come up with his own individual design of imaging systems support structure. Gary had made up his mind to pick the best design structure based on a majority vote of the rest of the team members. Here we are able to identify a streak of fairness in Gary’s leadership style.
Recommendations
For starters, we would like to point out the good aspects of Gary’s leadership skills. Any good leader will not find it hard to delegate responsibilities to his subordinates, which is what Gary did to both Lovas and Benett. He did not attempt to micro-manage. He had good people skills that enabled him to develop and maintain sound working relationships with all his subordinates. Gary never looked down upon any of his subordinates; if anything he welcomed their ideas and implemented some of them on occasion.
It is apparent that Gary’s ability to foster team-building among his subordinates was wanting. From the very beginning of the project, very little if any value was placed on working together as a unit. Little did they know that this was going to be the cause of most of their miseries in the subsequent days. Despite Gary’s exploits as a person with good people skills, he was unable to make Lovas and Benett work together harmoniously.
A good leader is supposed to be extremely fast in decision-making, a trait that Gary did not possess. He should try extremely hard to improve his ability of making decisions fast so as not to hamper the interests of the company.
References
Amabile, Schatzel. The Satera Team at Imatron Systems, Inc. Harvard Business School. 2003. Print.