Case Study

Leading for Performance Excellence

Mary Beth is the Director of Marketing for an insurance company characterized by constant change. Like many companies, the pace at Mary Beth's is hectic. The last thing she needed was a performance issue with Sara, a recently hired direct report who was managing the implementation of a series of prospect seminars scheduled to begin in just a few weeks.

With invitations scheduled to drop and a multimedia advertising campaign ready to launch, Sara had been unsuccessful in getting IT to create a registration landing page for the company website. Since the website is the primary vehicle for people to register for the event, this failure threatened the entire program, a costly initiative the company was counting on to deliver significant revenue in the second half of the year.

Mary Beth was blind-sided by the issue when, at a program readiness review, Nick, a project manager in the IT department, reported that the registration page failed its test. Sara had been telling Mary Beth that everything was moving along just fine.

Mary Beth met with both Sara and Nick separately. Here's what she discovered: According to Sara, Nick is totally incompetent and, despite several conversations and promises to deliver, has been unable to produce the landing page. She declared herself '...too busy to babysit Nick.' Nick told Mary Beth that Sara gives vague and conflicting instructions, and often gets verbally abusive when things don't go her way.

Confused and nervous about the potential outcome of this project, Mary Beth hired CBL Associates to coach Sara and help her with her time management and interpersonal communication and influencing skills.

After several coaching sessions, it seemed to Cindy that, while Sara needed to do some things differently in order to be more successful, there were a number of things Mary Beth also needed to do to solve this performance crisis and avoid similar situations in the future.

The coaching assignment, then, was expanded. In addition to working one-on-one with Sara to improve her communication skills, Cindy coached Mary Beth to help her become a more effective manager.

Mary Beth realized that she had made a lot of assumptions in managing Sara. She had not been clear with Sara about her expectations and that she had not monitored progress very well. With Cindy's guidance, Mary Beth executed a strategy that included the following actions:

• Create a set of milestones and a detailed timeline for the rest of Sara's project.
• Communicate that she expected Sara to keep her informed of issues and potential problems.
• Let Sara know that it is permissible, in fact expected, that she ask for assistance.
• Plan and adhere to a schedule of regular meetings, so that Sara can keep Mary Beth apprised of progress and issues, minimizing the risk of future surprises.
• Share some of her own strategies for communicating in difficult situations. By sharing her own experiences with Sara and modeling different ways of dealing with Nick, Mary Beth would increase the likelihood that meetings between the two colleagues would no longer be screaming matches.
• Delegate more of her routine responsibilities to qualified staff members, so that she could focus more time on proactively managing the performance of all of her staff members.
• Intervene on Sara's behalf when problems arose that were outside of Sara's control.

In addition, Mary Beth worked with Sara, Nick, and Nick's manager to renegotiate IT's commitments and gained agreement from both Nick and his boss to the new terms. It quickly became clear that Nick was still not fulfilling his commitments. Since Nick's non-performance was out of Sara's control, Mary Beth did not hold her accountable for it. When Mary Beth met with Nick's boss again to request that he hold Nick accountable for his part of the project, the project got back on track with the support of Nick's boss.

In the end, the registration page was developed, passed its acceptance test, and was ready to go just in time for program launch.