The blowup

This is a story of a team which due to poor team leadership and management broke down in a spectacular way and send a small company into mass redundancies.

The team seemed well and everyone seemed to be getting along with everyone, there were occasional negative comments in meetings which became more common and if you overheard talk at lunch you would know not everyone was the biggest fan of some team members in particular but the work was getting done and most people seemed happy. Was the team being managed well, well no, the project manager was also best friends with one of the junior team members and was not shy about showing it, he would hand her all the easy work to hide the fact that basically she was incompetent and only had the job because of him. This was the unspoken view of the team and the longer this went on the worse it got. What made matters worse was that this team member also happened ton be a very bossy and arrogant woman who had fallen for her own hype and though she was above everyone else. People put up with this to try and stay professional but there is only so much people can take and in one meeting when she put down another team member it was clear they had had enough and out it came, all the build up anger was unleashed and this resulted in the girl crying off to the boss. After that the team could no longer work well together, arguments plagued meetings and the slow pace of work got back to the client who decided to pull the plug on the project and resulted in the lost jobs of 10 people. All down to one managers decision to play favourites with his team members and make no secret of it.



“One of the tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency.”
Arnold H. Glasow

http://www.leadership-quotes.org/




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