Leadership what is it rowe

When I arrived at the store, the staff morale was terrible. To make matters worse, most of the key people in the company felt that I didnt deserve the store managers position. Foodco Ltd. FC , with its head office located in St. Catharines, Ontario, was a large player in the Niagara Peninsula grocery retailing industry.

FC, a retailer in this market since , was currently made up of seven stores: three St. Catharines locations, one Welland location, one Port Colborne location, and two Lincoln locations. Most of the ownership and key management positions were held by Frank Bellafacia, Tony Bellafacia, and Rocco Bellafacia, as shown in Exhibit 1.

Selected financial ratios for FC are shown in Exhibit 2. FC had created a powerful presence in this industry by developing and refining a strategy that worked. Their product offering was that of any typical supermarket: groceries, meats, bakery and dairy items, packaged foods, and nonfood items. Each store carried eight to ten thousand. As the recently appointed store manager of the newest Foodco location in St. Catharines, Ontario, Mike knew that he had to turn the store around by improving its financial performance and the employee morale.

He also knew that something had to be done immediately because the losses at this store were seriously affecting the entire company. FC planned to widen the selection available by adding more lines and to follow a general trend in consumer preferences toward an increased percentage of nonfood items in the product mix. Central to FCs strategy was a wellmanaged marketing effort. Weekly flyers were distributed that highlighted five or six items. FC priced these items below cost to draw customers.

The rest of the flyers products were representative of all the product groups. FCs ability to differentiate itself from the other competitors centred on its corporate vision: low food prices and fast, friendly service.

Central to the FC competitive strategy was the mandate to be the low-price leader among conventional supermarkets, during good and bad economic times.

Mike Bellafacia stated: This is a no frills and low price store for a no frills and low price clientele. Most markets are shifting in this direction. FC had developed aggressive expansion plans with six stores being considered for development. The industry was shifting from a simple mass market to a spectrum of distinct, serviceable segments. A recent statistic stated that 30 percent of consumers switch stores every year.

Moreover, a new Food Marketing Institute study found that consumers buy on the basis of the following criteria ranked in decreasing priority : service, quality products, variety, and low prices.

Thus, there was now more opportunity for competitive differentiation based on service and on quality than on price alone. There were tremendous opportunities for niche players to enter the market, and such entrants had been observed. Health and organic food stores, fruit markets, and independent single-commodity stores i. Consumer demands varied from region to region, and many small independent retail grocers emerged to meet these demands both in the Niagara Peninsula and across all of Ontario.

These independents managed not only to survive, but to take sizable portions of market share from the major chains. This shift toward niche. Traditionally, the road to store manager SM began within one of the stores at a lower management position. The family culture within each Food Terminal location was very important to FC management. Thus, store managers were selected from within the company to ensure a leader who understood the FC vision and values.

Five managers reported directly to the SM, as shown in Exhibit 4, and their development was an important job for the SM. The SM position became increasingly more important at FC. Many of the current SM functions that used to be handled by the head office were delegated downward to the store level to allow head office to focus on overall company strategy.

The stores were now more attuned to the local market they serve. An SM was responsible for the following: 1. Ensuring that merchandising skills were strong among all department managers; 2. Monitoring local market information; 3. Focusing staff on organizational goals such as sales, gross margin, and profit goals ; 4. Organizing weekly staff meetings; 5. Developing all employees and encouraging staff training; 6.

Generating and producing sales, gross margin, and profit objectives; 7. Meeting cost objectives motivating the staff to be cost conscious ; 8.

Analyzing the performance of each inter-store department; and 9. Mike would combine the analytical skills developed in the business school with his knowledge of the family business to address these issues. In his last year in the HBA program, Mike and a team of student consultants spent the year focusing on the long-term strategy and competitive advantage of FC. They examined every aspect of the company and developed many strategic recommendations for the top management at FC.

Upon graduation, Mike decided to work for FC. He planned to start off working in some of the various departments i. This would have allowed him the opportunity to work under some of the most knowledgeable managers in the company.

He didnt expect to be store manager so soon. Both Mike and FC management felt strongly about that. However, while Mike was on vacation in May, FC management made a chancy decision. The stores performance was deteriorating, and Mike was expected to change things.

Mike reflected on the first week at the three-month old location: When I first started I was extremely nervous. The district supervisor brought me to the store to have a meeting with the department managers, and I could see the look of disappointment in their eyes.

Most of these managers had been forced to move to this new store from other locations. The staff morale was definitely low to begin with. During his summers at university, he was assigned special. Responsible for maintaining the lines of communication between the store and head office.

Mike commented: This building used to be a Food City that was on the verge of closing down. We acquired it and. After getting settled in, Mike began to realize that something was terribly wrong at the Scott and Vine food terminal. The store was not. The task I had was to get above average performance from an average staff. They were just not driven to succeed, were poorly trained, and many of them, especially the managers, didnt want to be there. Customers were not treated with respect by those employees who had frequent contact with them.

Department managers were doing a poor job of managing and motivating the employees in their departments. Department sales and gross profit results were poor.

See Exhibit 5 for a breakdown of departmental sales and gross profit figures. The previous manager had performed poorly by FC standards. Although he had been an SM at other grocery stores, he was unable to create a productive atmosphere at this one. The other St. They had a long way to go. What took place at the Scott and Vine location was a symptom of a more serious problem: the performance of FC as a whole. Mike explained the situation: Some of what was happening here can be attributed to FC.

They became fat cats and, in the process, they lost touch with the customers. Pricing had gone way out of line, cross-border shopping was cutting into our bottom line, and our marketing efforts were poor.

The weekly ads that are developed by head office for all the stores were not drawing in customers like they used to. As a result, we had no word-of-mouth advertising which is so essential to a retail outlet. When our sales across the board went down, we had only ourselves to blame. Difficulties arose within the staff that made the SM job even more strenuous. Mike described the situation: There were a lot of people problems that I had to face.

The weekly staff meetings we had together were a joke. Instead of a time to interact and solve problems together, it was just a waste of time.

As well, the entire staff was demoralized due to the continual failure to meet monthly performance goals since the store opened. We had the worst performance in the FC organization. I felt as though head office was blaming me for the stores poor performance, and I knew that I had to set some goals that we could all rally behind.

For the first month I was very autocratic. I had to be! I replaced all the cashiers that month, because of the numerous customer complaints about their attitude, but that was just the beginning of my problems. The part-time staff were continually standing around doing nothing. The receiver was not handling the deliveries very well. I found it tough to get along with the department managers.

My worst employee problems came from the produce and meat managers. They just were not doing their jobs well. I tried going over the product orders with them, developing schedules, and assisting with their product display plans. I even brought in some of FCs department experts to go over things with them. They would not listen to any of my suggestions. Even though I had some problems with my grocery manager, I began to see that he had real potential for managing.

There was some resentment toward me for being a family member and getting the SM position so young, and as a result, people would not open up to me. I also knew that some of the other SMs at other locations didnt want me to succeed, and I found myself conveniently left out of important SM meetings. To make. Some of the more prevalent problems are listed below: 1. Product rotation a job monitored by department managers and very important for customer satisfaction was handled improperly.

It was not uncommon to find empty counters and shelves. The staff paid very little attention to cleanliness. Customers complained about this. LeadershipWhat Is It? Mike Bellafacia found this out. The staff morale had changed very little. Customers were not responding to advertisement efforts, and things looked as if they were going to worsen. Mike reflected on what had happened during these last two months and where things were going. He wondered if he was. Had FC made a big mistake putting him in the position of SM?

Thinking back on his education, Mike commented: The business school helped me understand the decision-making process. Im not afraid to make decisions, do analysis and pin-point problem areas. But it didnt teach me how to get the job done, the execution of a decision.

More importantly, I was not prepared to deal with people who didnt have the training I did, or the desire to succeed as I did. As he looked over the financial data, he wondered if he should lay off some employees to bring the wages expense down.

Mike reflected on this: We didnt have the sales to support the exorbitant number of employees we had at the store. He was concerned about how he would handle these layoffs. He also thought about the serious morale problem.

Many of the employees were lazy and demotivated, and customers complained regularly about cleanliness and service. He wondered if there was a way to use the weekly meetings to his advantage. Things seemed just as complicated as they did in June. Tom Mann, the technical director, had just phoned to let him know that some very damaging and defamatory comments about the AmeriChem plant had been made by Cassandra Seare at a board meeting at Toronto head office earlier in the day.

She claimed to have heard that there was an ongoing problem with drinking on the job at AmeriChem, and that this had been the cause of an accident that had occurred there two weeks ago. Hartnet knew that the comments were entirely insupportable, but that they could destroy the reputation of the plant; yet, he was at a loss as to how to deal with such slander.

Nevertheless, he knew that he must respond immediately. In , with a view to expanding their industrial and institutional operations and capturing a larger share of the North American market, the company acquired a plant in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, from an American competitor. The new subsidiary, CanChem, retained almost all of the plant personnel, including several in middle management, and became the head office for industrial and institutional business in North America.

Over the next few years, due to some astute decisions in manufacturing, CanChem expanded and diversified. In the mids, Barco initiated various realignments within its North American business. This included three acquisitions over a period of four years. Each new acquisition necessitated a reorganization of management at every level, and a shift in corporate culture.

Barco first acquired an American company that operated a series of small plants in various locations in the southern United States. In this move, the existing president of CanChem was let go, the head office relocated to Tennessee and the president of the American concern became responsible for the new, merged company. The name CanChem, however, was retained. This time the company that Barco acquired, Ameritol, was much larger, and the merging of operations was further complicated by the fact that, because Ameritols Canadian plant was just outside Toronto, the new company would now have two large plants in southwestern Ontario.

After much deliberation, Barco decided to keep the CanChem plant in operation, close the Ameritol plant, but leave their Canadian head office in the Toronto location. The company name was also changed to AmeriChem. While the fact that the original CanChem plant would remain open seemed encouraging, it soon became clear that management there would have little say in the actual running of operations. Over the first few months after the acquisition, almost all of the local management had been let go.

Most positions disappeared, but those that remained were filled by Ameritol managers. The CanChem plant manager, who had also been vice-president of operations, was replaced by a manager from a smaller Ameritol plant in the midwestern United States, and the Canadian corporate offices were consolidated in the Toronto area.

In , planning further to extend its market and manufacturing in the United States, Barco,. This move led to another consolidation of sales and marketing and to several changes in product lines. Corporate AmeriChem decided that profit margins for certain of the Windsor plants products were too small to justify continuing to manufacture those lines, and informed the management that they must reduce their operations from three to two shifts, and lay off one-third of the workers.

With termination of operations in a large part of the factory, the corporate group decided to relocate all warehousing for the area to the vacant space. By mid, the plant that had been head office for North America had employed 40 managers from corporate to junior level and factory personnel. It had accommodated manufacturing, warehousing, and a development lab and had been reduced to five managers and workers. In the last year, the plant manager had been replaced by a recruit from an outside company.

After only four months, the new manager resigned, and while a search was conducted for yet another plant manager, the position was filled by the local human resources manager, who had come to AmeriChem shortly after the latest merger.

Little that affected the day-to-day running of the plant changed. The merger with Ameritol was much more unsettling, especially for management. Under the new centralized system, decisions regarding all aspects of the plants running were made at the corporate level. Changes were made rapidly, often suddenly, without any local input, and included all processes: reporting chains, financial operations and even computer systems. Although those managers from the original workforce who remained at the plant demonstrated co-operation.

The CanChem factory had always fostered independence in its management, and in the years before the merger, had been developing strategies to move decision-making downward, offering more autonomy and responsibility to workers at all levels. The philosophy aimed to give all employees a sense of control of their own task area, and offered the extra motivation of profit sharing. Co-operation, information sharing and innovative thinking were encouraged, and good performance at any level would receive positive recognition.

The new AmeriChem management system was based on an entirely different model where decisions came from the top down, and involved little or no consultation with the parties involved. Independence was discouraged, and everything was done according to preset rules, and required documentation, usually on a predesignated form.

Information, whether about budget, operations, personnel or any other issue was released only on a need-to-know basis, so that those at the plant had little sense of their role in the larger organization, or of future plans. Also, Rod Wall, the director of operations, would arrive, often without warning, and announce changes, cuts, etc. Clearly, the new AmeriChem management style and corporate culture clashed with the one that CanChem employees had come to expect, and a gap was developing between corporate and local management, who were uncomfortable about being expected simply to implement orders without explanation.

Wall, on the other hand, felt that the Windsor factory was inefficient, and that management needed to be more aggressive and make greater demands from the workers on the line.

He had even reportedly referred to it as The Windsor Country Club. While he had encountered no direct opposition, he sensed a resistance to his authority that he felt was undermining the attempts at corporate level to make this factory more productive.

The Windsor management, on the other hand, were somewhat. They strongly suspected that, for them, advancement in the new AmeriChem organization would be be difficult and very limited. When the last acquisition took place, the workforce was reduced by one-third, and the management pared down to five, which included the various plant managers appointed by AmeriChem, the gap between the Windsor group and the corporate body became a definite rift.

From the plants point of view, the decisions made no sense: the cuts in manufacturing also undermined the infrastructure that supported all the other operations; the cuts to the workforce were too deepthose who were left were now having to work high-paid overtime hours. Eventually, several of the workers had to be called back, but they were given part-time contracts without benefits, causing even more insecurity and resentment among the line-workers.

From the perspective of the corporate management, and especially Wall, however, the Windsor plant was a thorn in the flesh. American head office had become convinced that both workers and management there were resistant to perfectly reasonable change, and were, consequently, unco-operative and unproductive.

The remaining managers were viewed as, at best, recalcitrant and, at worst, subversive. Meanwhile, the group in the Canadian head office, which had made all corporate decisions before the merger, was particularly disgruntled. They had stringently resisted the closing of the Ameritol plant outside Toronto, and took the problems at the Windsor plant as vindication of their view that Barco, Inc.

Besides, they also resented that they were now responsible only for sales and marketing, and that the American head office seemed to be calling all the shots. The Ameritol management had, however, fared somewhat better in the transition than the CanChem group: several had been moved to corporate positions and the previous plant. His approach to the management at Windsor was generally reasonable and respectful, and he was quite often willing to listen to their point of view.

But while he was more approachable and positive than Wall, he unwittingly exasperated the Windsor group by frequently pointing out how much more efficient the Toronto area Ameritol factory had been than the Windsor plant. He had come to CanChem from another division of the company. Although happy with his existing job and prospects, he felt that the move to head office of the new industrial division offered the possibility of a shift into the corporate sector.

During the first four or five years he was involved in the negotiations and planning of expansion. He had been enjoying the challenge and rewards of his new position and was quite sure that he had made the right move.

With the first merger, although head office would no longer be in Windsor, he was still optimistic. He was very much involved in planning and strategy, and was travelling to the various sites in the United States to make recommendations about their viability for development or possible closure.

Even in the massive disruption of the second merger, he was not entirely pessimistic; in several interviews with Wall he had been led to expect that prospects for advancement within the merged companies would be good. Gradually, however, as the merger evolved and cuts were made at all levels, it became clear that it was extremely unlikely that anyone who had been part of the original CanChem team would be offered any real responsibility in the new organization.

When the dust settled, only three of the original managers remained. In all of the. It had become clear to Hartnet that his best prospect for the future was not at AmeriChem, and he had had some promising offers from outside contacts, but a decision to leave was complicated by other considerations. Because he had come to Barco while still very young, he was, at 51, less than four years from being able to retire with full pension.

Hartnets present position was not without challenge, and it also took him to the various other AmeriChem locations, allowing him some opportunity to observe their operations and meet new people. Although the atmosphere at the plant was inevitably tense and unsettled, Hartnet had always got along well with his colleagues, and enjoyed the respect of his co-workers at all levels.

Although Hartnets management style was obviously very different from that of Wall, he felt quite at ease with Mann, the technical director to whom he reported. Mann seemed to have a fairly realistic sense of what was happening at the AmeriChem plant, and accepted that the workforce there was committed to making the factory profitable and successful.

Hartnet believed there was no malice in Manns comments about the superiority of the defunct factory where he had been plant manager. But, while Hartnet felt that Mann was fair and reasonable, he also knew that Mann firmly supported and would not question the overall corporate strategy.

Meanwhile, Hartnet immersed himself in developing his knowledge and skills in HS. He started working towards a diploma in the area, took night courses, went to residential workshops and met frequently with the HS managers from the other AmeriChem sites. He soon decided that he might even enjoy the next few years, and emerge with a whole new set of skills and experience. There was always, however, the threat that even his position might be cut.

His ultimate survival, of course, was to a large extent outside of his own control. He knew that Wall, in particular, thought him far too unagressive. In effect, they simply had different management.

Hartnet rushed to the aisle from which the commotion was emanating and found Don Page, a forklift driver, hopping on one foot, holding the other and cursing fiercely. The truck was partly buried, supporting a shelf whose main post had been knocked out by the vehicles back end. Hartnet quickly cleared the area, ordered that the damaged racking be inspected and made safe until it could be repaired, and at the same time made Page sit out of harms way with his damaged foot raised.

While waiting for the ambulance, which he had asked another worker to call, Hartnet asked Page what had happened. The driver claimed that his stand-up truck had gone out of control while he was maneuvering with two drums on the forks, and had careened backwards into the racks. When he saw that a collision was inevitable, Page had tried to jump off, but had caught his foot between the upright post and the truck.

Once the injured man had been removed to hospital, Hartnet set about finding some eyewitnesses so that he could prepare a full account of the incident. It was clear that this would be a lost-time accident and he would therefore have to notify not only the AmeriChem Occupational Health and Safety Committee, but also the Ministry of Labour.

The nearest observer had been one of the mechanics, Bill Paquette, who claimed that he thought Page had been driving quite a lot faster than he should have in that area, but no one had actually seen the collision happen.

Next, Hartnet took photographs of the scene and the damage, and when he had finished, sent the truck for a full inspection. Knowing that this was one of the vehicles that had arrived in the last few days from one of the warehouses that. Apparently it had not, and was now found to have some minor mechanical flaws, but the maintenance person who found the faults assured Hartnet that they would not have affected the vehicles efficient operation.

Reading 8. Authentic Leadership Defined. Theoretical Approaches. Practical Approaches. How Does Authentic Leadership Work? Case 9. Reading 9. Practicing Adaptive Leadership.

Leadership in the New Reality. Case Reading The Team Leadership Model. Six Components of Strategic Leadership. Strategic Leadership Versus Leadership. Positional Versus Behavioral. Gender: Examining Leadership Style and Effectiveness. The Glass Ceiling Turned Labyrinth. Explaining the Labyrinth. Navigating the Labyrinth. Culture, Diversity, Ethnocentrism, and Prejudice. Cultural Dimensions.

Leadership Behavior and Culture Clusters. A Definition of Ethics. Ethical Theories. The Centrality of Ethics to Leadership. Ethical Leadership Principles. How Does Ethical Leadership Work? Highlight essential content, features, and artwork from the book. Chapter-specific discussion questions help launch classroom interaction by prompting students to engage with the material and by reinforcing important content.

Case Notes providing summaries, suggested teaching strategies, and analyses of the cases. Key features. A new chapter on Followership helps students understand how to be effective followers.

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