Case study: the change that wouldn't

Situation

A manager is experiencing considerable stress, because of constant interruptions and issues being brought to him to be resolved. To address the situation, he creates teams headed by team leaders. All team members are to report to their leaders when issues need to get resolved. At first, things work well, but after a while, the manager is once again besieged by requests and demands on his time, which in turn increase stress and dissatisfaction.

Intervention

Through a combination of shadowing and interviews, the following problems emerge:

• Team leaders have no authority. Whenever they have an issue, they take it to the manager for him to handle.
• The manager still handles all the problems, instead of teaching the team leaders how to handle them on their own. This cements the leaders' perception that they have no authority.
• After some time, team members realize that they, too, can go straight to the manager to get answers, simply by pretexting that team leaders are swamped or unavailable.

To resolve the issue:

• Coaching for the manager to allow him to hand off responsibility and commensurate authority to team leaders. A delegation system is set up, allowing him to be informed of projects regularly and to oversee projects effectively.
• Training for team leaders on time management and problem resolution.
• Specific time slots are set aside for the manager to provide training to the team leaders on their various new responsibilities.

Result

The manager's stress is greatly reduced by having his workload distributed among the team leaders. The manager stops enabling team members' behaviour by sending them to their team leaders whenever they come to him with issues to resolve. The team leaders feel better about themselves and their jobs because they are now able to resolve most issues and make many important decisions wiithout needing to resort to the manager. Team members get what they want: quick resolution of their issues.