Case Study 13
My Manager is my Superhero
Introduction
Amit Shah started his own Insurance Agency in the year 1995. With a handful of employees the company was just getting started. Amongst all his employees, Aditya Sharma, the accountant was someone that Amit relied on the most. Aditya Sharma was Congeniality. Right from the clients to his colleagues, Aditya was someone everyone depended on. Even though he was the accountant, he looked into various other aspects of the business.
He was involved in the daily operations of the company right from administration to client servicing. Things used to run smoothly with the help of Aditya. The management which mostly consisted of Amit Shah‟s family was extremely happy with Aditya‟s work.
Scenario
By the year 2010, the company expanded with a capacity of over 100 employees and offices in 4 different cities. By that Amit Shah‟s son has joined the business with his father. A lot had changed over the years, but one thing that did not change was the management‟s dependency on Aditya. He was promoted to the General Manager of the company and they still went to him for every small hiccup that came their way. Aditya was not aware of the fact that he was unable to cope up with the work being delegated to him.
Over the years he started to juggle various job roles given to him by the management.
Finally, by 2014, the pressure was too much for Aditya to take. Aditya suffered from a mild attack due to work pressure. Since the management was heavily dependent on Aditya, they were not able to execute and
delegate work to all the department‟s HODs. Due to that a lot of confusion and problems started within the organization and with customers.
Management somehow managed till Aditya resumed work. During the vacuum, Amit Shah realized that they are expecting too much from Aditya. Amit Shah wanted to define the role of Aditya in the organization and made him in charge of operations and other activities. He wanted to limit his scope only to commercial and financial activities. He discussed the same with his son and Adiyta. Aditya was ready for the change and they recruited managers for some of the key positions. Aditya was supposed to delegate work gradually to managers and make them responsible for making them the HODs for the respective departments. Since the management had an old habit of following up everything through Aditya, the majority of decisions are taken by him. This resulted in late decision making and making the HODs redundant. The HOD‟s were unhappy as for every small decision they needed the approval from the GM.
As a result the work environment became frustrating. The employees were not happy with the way things were going. The management constantly put pressure on the new HOD‟s. All this led to a dip in sales and largely affected the customer satisfaction and sales. Aditya also felt burdened by the amount of work he was given even after revising his role in the organization. Amit Shah realized that he needed someone to analyse the situation. He decided to call in HRD Management Consultancy to guide them about where exactly they are going wrong.
Finding Facts
After a thorough analysis we found the following points:
- We took a round of interviews with all the management members, HODs and Aditya
- The organization had established their future road map and strategy very well
- The organization was running on very good ERP and the process was significantly mapped and reports were very good for the decision making
- Aditya was an asset to the company but the only drawback was that he was juggling more roles than he could handle in the organization
- There was an organizational structure is in place and the HR manager tried to define the roles and responsibilities and the KRA but it had no major impact
- The family had put their entire trust on Aditya, and were having a difficult time adjusting to trust anyone else, which resulted in information overload on Aditya
- Due to that, Aditya could not delegate the work to HODs
- All management members always wanted to involve Aditya in the decision making process even if he was not
- The management was unable to gel with the new managers and HODs and wanted Aditya to train and delegate work to them
- This consumed a lot of time and energy from Aditya and made the decision making process slow and ultimately, Aditya was blamed
- Management expected Aditya to handle everything just like he used to when the company was small. They expected him to work like a superhero‟
- Aditya spoke to us and told that the management demanded too much from him and he was pushing his limits to deliver it
- Management expected Aditya to be accountable for every
- Slowly and gradually Management members were started blaming Aditya for misleading the team and disturbing the culture of the organization.
- However, that was not the fact as it was because of the management that the organization culture was disturbed
- All the roles and responsibilities and the KRA was set for all the HODs but there was no accountability set for any of the HODs due to heavy dependency on Aditya and making him more accountable without specific responsibilities
Solution Implemented:
We discussed the complete scenario with Amit Shah and his son and told that people are divided in to two groups – “People with lot of responsibilities without accountability and people with no responsibilities and but no accountability‟. We explained the management a number of incidences where their approach towards the particular issues is more centric towards Aditya rather than delegating and resolving through
respective “HOD”. We told the management that they have to first change their way of working, delegating, reporting, reviewing and decision making before we start any other activities, because without this paradigm shift nothing is going to change in the organization.
We told Amit Shah that Aditya was made into a manager who multitasks, and now he has become a trouble shooter “A Superhero” which is leading him and the organization in the wrong direction. We told Amit Shah that we need to give some time to Aditya and also focus on only one or two portfolios which we will be doing along with the management‟s support.
Amit Shah raised a valid point that they didn‟t trust any other people in the organization except Aditya. They were not sure how to build their trust and confidence on the new HODs. We took up this challenge and mentored the HODs. We defined the KRAs for each HOD. We also defined the reporting method and the review mechanism. Amit Shah has accepted the proposal and decided to be a part of the exercise to improve the organization culture.
We have prepared the road map and following solutions implemented:-
- We redefined the organizational structure
- We redefined the roles and responsibilities
- We defined the KRAs for all the HODs and started taking reviews along with management to change the management‟s approach
- The Management members were trained about structured reporting, reviews and agenda based meeting.
- We called the ERP people to map the KRA in the process so that after we move out of the organization the evaluation takes place at regular
- We created cross functional team to make the KRA more effective and defined the “Team KRA” between two or three department making all departments equally responsible
- We have framed and handed over the incentive scheme to the management based on “KRA” and “Team KRA”
Outcome
After a year of streamlining the processes and building the organizational structure, there has been a significant decline in customer complaints. The HOD‟s also became more responsible and accountable and started performing independently. Aditya took over the finances of the organization completely and due that the finance management improved.
Most importantly due to “Team KRA” the culture of team work and motivation level increased in all employees resulting in an increase in work efficiency and revenue loss.