HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW [ARTICLE REVIEW]

MIDTERM EXAMINATION MAKE-UP

Course Code: HRM 460 Course Name: Leadership

Student’s Name: ID Number:

General Instructions: See the attached Harvard Business Review (HBR) article entitled: “Leading the
Team You Inherit” then answer all the questions below. Provide a minimum of 400 words per answer to
each question.

1. The HBR reading “Leading the team you inherit” does stress upon the fact that good leaders must

have the ability to influence group member to achieve group goals. In the article, the author points out

the fact that good leadership ensures that the group and teams working for under you will always have a

clear sense of direction and purpose. Good leaders aid in building group cohesion, facilitation

communication and achieving team objectives. The talent to influence one’s leadership skills on to their

group to meet the organization’s need is an important element in the entire leadership development

picture. According to the article, good leaders encourages people to exhibit high-performance behaviors

such as sharing information freely, identifying and dealing with conflict swiftly, solving problems

creatively, supporting one another, and presenting a unified face to the outside world once decisions

have been made. They try to turn independently existing groups into a unified team through different

activities like creating and forming common performance metrics and goals and shared visions. The

author then further goes on by saying that these desirable behaviors can be achieved by focusing more

on four factors: the team’s composition, its alignment with a shared vision, its operating model, and its

integration of new rules and expectations.

There were several concepts within the article which were related to the chapter we had studied in class.

For example, Chapter 1 touches on the concept of “leadership challenges” within an organisation. It

points out on different challenged and problems experienced by leaders ranging from difficulties to learn
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new duties, adapt to new roles and maintaining existing and new relations. This concept was further

elaborated in the HBR article. The article talked about a newly executive VP named David and the

leadership difficulties that he had faced in the beginning. As a new leader of an underperforming

company, he was stuck with the existing team members and had to work with them. He didn’t have the

option to cherry-pick member or assess individuals as it was a time-consuming process. Hence, he had to

work with the people he inherited. In order to over this difficulty, he had take-over and transform the

team by providing guidance on how to navigate the transition and improve performance. Another

concept mentioned in the chapter was how leaders can influence the organisational culture. The article

also stresses on how leadership can affect the company culture. The first para of the article points out

how the company had a broken culture as a byproduct of poor leadership from senior management. This

once again changed after the advent of the David Benet. He set up a positive work culture by bringing in

a sense of shared vision and purpose, inspired others with his actions, introduced fair compensation and

benefits for the employees and also boosted their moral by making sure that their opinions were heard.

Although it took time, because old habits die hard, his effective leadership changed the organisational

culture to a great extent.

2. After careful consideration, I feel that the contingency model that best suits the article is the Path Goal

Theory. This theory says that effective leadership should focus on helping group attain their goals and

provide them with the support and information required achieve the goals that are set to meet the

organization’s needs. In the article, we see how the David as a new VP helps his employees achieve

goals and also helps whatever obstacles that were in their way. This was done through several steps

mentioned in the case study. We see him reshaping the team to increase employee productivity by

bringing in the best talent to perform the job. He followed the Path goal theory by adequately

recognizing when his teams needed to perform independently or autonomy or when they needed to be

interdependent. He doesn’t bring in team building activities like creating a shared vision and establishing

common performance goals and metrics when certain teams needed greater independence as it would

just frustrate everyone, because little or no collaborative work needs to be done. Before doing this, he

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would always ask question like “Will the people I supervise have to collaborate a lot, or is it OK if they

operate mostly independently?” , “Should they be let to work independently” etc. David, however, had a

team of

functional leaders who were quite interdependent. For example, he needed his VPs of sales, marketing,

and communications to work closely together on refining and executing go-to-market strategies for the

two products. So, he had to gauge their relationships and collaborative capabilities. When followers need

challenge, he also tried making tasks challenging. This is also a point mentioned in the Point goal theory.

For example, David and his team started setting challenging goals for the next three months’ sales; then

they set about delivering it. The result of this decision was a cycle of achievement and confidence from

his employee’s. By the end of David’s first year, sales growth had far outstripped targets. He also

helped make different operational tasks less routine, boring, or stressful. He looked into ways on to how

the team could operate more efficiently and productively. He streamlined various processes and tweaked

them to make it less stressful and encouraged collaboration to make it more interesting. He started

thinking more creatively about his team’s operating model and tried identifying real constraints on how

the work gets done in a better manner.

3. Mere intelligence is not all that necessary to become a successful leader in today’s business

environment. Having emotional intelligence and a good personality is very crucial to understand you

subordinates and lead them efficiently. This is also considered very important in David Benet’s analysis

of team building frameworks. Assessing the team, which is one of the first steps in the team building

framework, requires the leader to use his EQ to judge or evaluate team members based. David uses this

skill to understand different employee’s personalities and what motivates them, whether it be the VP of

Sales or the HR executive. This also allowed him to fire underperforming employees in proper manner

offering them the required compensation and benefits. He also found them alternative job openings in

other organizations to help them. This shows how efficiently David could deal with people and maintain

relationships. He also uses this EQ to align teams by understanding what motivates groups other than

compensation and benefits and also uses to find out more about hidden incentives that are getting in the

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way of groups working together for a common goal. He also uses it to put himself in other’s shoes to

look into different perspectives. This helps him to understand how different operating models could be

tweaked and changed to bring in maximum efficiency and productivity. All this helped in in changing

the destructive patterns of behavior within the company and foster a sense of shared purpose. David’s

personality as a leader also is very inspiring to his subordinates. He is successful in earning his team

members respect and also rebuilds trust, which was something that was missing with the last VP. He

does this by building transparency, psychological safety, and unity within the organisation. From the

starting he took control over the different teams and established ground rules and processes to feed. All

these points in the article shows how emotional intelligence and a strong personality is always desired

from a leader to sustain desired behaviors and served as a role model for your team members. It is this

personality of David as a leader that set him apart from that of the previous vice president and lead to his

employees accepting him. In the case we see his personality stable over time and across situations

whether it be dealing with new situations or difficult employees and teams. His personality is presented

to us as a set of characteristics rather than one trait. All this shows the importance of emotional

intelligence and personality for leaders of today.

4. Michael D. Watkin’s “Leading the Team You Inherit” was a very thoughtful article, has opened my

eyes to different was on how leaders can navigate major transitions and take over teams when entering a

new environment. It also helped me realized the importance for assessing the group dynamics, creating a

sense of purpose and accelerating team development. As a leadership student, I did try to critique some

of the limitations and methods used in the article. The authors starts the article by portraying an

underperforming company and a new candidate from outside is bought in to solve the problem. I felt that

as a new executive VP trying to solve the problem, he could have distributed greater responsibilities

amongst his team members. I feel that top leaders should push power downwards the hierarchy. This

will allow employees at all levels to make decisions. When strategic leaders distribute responsibilities

amongst employees, the true potential of collective intelligence, adaptability, and resilience are

harnessed. Being an outsider to the company, he would also have gotten more help an information

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regarding what was happening withing the organisation faster if he had done this at the beginning. Also,

a leader, instead of firing the HR executive, David should have tried engaging him and other employees

in training and development programs to improve their skills and abilities. Instead of letting go of

underperforming employees, he should have had conversations with them regarding the factors that lead

to their behavior and find out what was causing this problem. According to Jay Conger (professor in

Leadership Studies ), it is important to look into the root cause of an employee’s poor performance. As

leader, it is very important to ask oneself if the person fully understand all of their responsibilities or if

they received enough training. There again might be some limitations to this study as the same techniques

might not work in the Middle East, where people have different cultural values and perspectives.

This article was a very good read and would surely help me in taking up leadership roles in my future

professional life. I strongly believe that being a leader or a manager in a constantly changing business

environment like Dubai, where business needs and the market is disruptive, doesn’t always come with a

rulebook or a color-coded manual to learn about your team. A lot of new leaders often don’t feel like

they have an accurate view of what it means to be a manager when they get started in their role. This is

exactly where an article like this comes in help. This article taught me on how to become a proactive

leader and lead team using 3 main steps, which involved assessing, reshaping and accelerating teams.

With the help of these three steps, I believe that I will be able to take over and guide my team in the right

direction and also navigate transitions and improve performance as a great leader.

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