John Smithers at Sigtek Case Solution And Analysis, HBR Case Study Solution & Analysis of Harvard Case Studies

Question 3

The six quality goals focused on attaining a competitive edge in quality, being a cost leader, empowering employees, providing the right leadership, pursuing quality endlessly and formulation of a team focused on risk taking.

While these goals were to be communicated across the organizations, it should be noted that Patricof, the vice president of the engineering division himself had been unfamiliar with the approach. Involving Smithers in the programs had been an effective approach since he was already familiar with the concepts and it was a revision of terminologies for him. This meant that right leadership was provided to the teams for the change management process.

Telwork sent a team of corporate trainers for training the teams in Sigtek and these quality goals were communicated via training provided to 25 managers who attended the 2 day 16 hour program. However, Smithers and Murray were assigned the task of presenting the training program to the rest of the organization.

Although the actual program was to be implemented in September, this training was done to make the task easier for the instructors and for making the senior management grasp the entire scope of the training.

The senior management had not seen the program before and this training was the first time when they got to see what the program was about. The fact that there was no response from the senior management during the presentations gave the idea that the management was not completely committed to the implementation of the program.

Question 4

John Smithers was the change leader during for this change management process. He was not only assigned the task of training the teams in terms of getting the change implemented across the organization but he was also supposed to raise their motivation levels and co-ordinate activities that would have made this change possible.

As per the change management process suggested by Kotter, Smithers was unable to get the change implemented effectively and the program was put on hold. The fact was that the disparity between the engineering and manufacturing groups had caused barriers to effective implementation of change. In addition to this, Kotter’s change management process was not completely followed, which was another reason why Smithers was unable to get the Total Quality program implemented successfully.

Smithers may have been in charge of communicating the approach but he was unable to empower the employees of each department since they were still directly reporting to their own senior managers. In addition to this, the change management process required the visibility of small successes before the team could be motivated towards bringing about bigger changes.

Although Smithers had the zeal and energy to motivate the teams, he believed that the visible successes were far too small for creating the commitment and enthusiasm necessary for mobilizing the workforce. He was looking for big wins while as per Kotter’s model, small wins needed to be highlighted in order to bring about the zeal and motivation that would lead to bigger wins.

Firstly Smithers himself had realized that the personnel were not empowered especially as he had heard direct feedback from most of the line workers regarding how their input was being ignored. At this point, Smithers could have taken a different approach in terms of persuading the top management regarding empowering employees rather than hindering their input.

Even though Smithers felt that the small wins were not enough to arouse enthusiasm and commitment, he could have used these to show how the Total Quality program was gaining momentum. By considering these small wins insignificant, not only was Smithers violating Kotter’s eight-step change management process but he was also unable to show any achievements to the senior management that could have increased their commitment to the program.

In addition to this, Smithers was not assertive in terms of clarifying his point regarding the pace of the program. Not only had it become clear to him that the current schedule was unrealistic, other than that he was also aware of the lack of empowerment given to the workers. Instead of going ahead with the program despite his dissatisfaction with the management, Smithers should have convinced Murray to join him in taking the request forward assertively to the senior management.

Question 4

Sigtek was implementing this program as per the orders of its parent organization, Telwork whereas the senior managers at the organization were completely oblivious to the programs and its requirements. It was obvious that the plan had not been made according to Sigtek’s needs and the subsidiary was being asked to implement a program which could not be mapped to the current organizational structure of Sigtek without making the required adjustments..................................

This is just a sample partial case solution. Please place the order on the website to order your own originally done case solution.