As the head of training, I was a team member of a cross functional team organized by a pharmaceutical company to address ways to increase field force effectiveness. At the time the team was organized the company was surpassing sales goals, however, recognizing that within three years the company would begin to face loss of patent protection, increased governmental price pressures and generic competition, the president sponsored this team to find ways to be more competitive in a more difficult environment. Other members included heads of BT, HR, OE, Sales and several outside consultants. The team leader was an in line sales manager from the US who had spent time overseas in the US military.
The leader took the advice of the other team members to reach out to members of country organizations to help facilitate their involvement and buy-in, as well as involve them in the decision making process. However, facilitative leadership was not a natural style for him. In both his military and sales leadership experience, he played a more traditional command and control leadership role. He also depended on expertise he developed in the US sales organization which was recognized as the most successful organization for the company.
The process went well until team members and/or country representatives made recommendations which went against the experience of the leader. In these cases he would either openly veto the recommendations or quietly remove their recommendations from the final documents without agreement from the other team members. After this happen several times, team members realized that unless they could convince him of their opinions early, their input would be ignored, even if their recommendations were otherwise accepted by the team. The project began to be delayed and country support declined. By the time the anticipated market changes began to negatively affect sales; the project was no closer to implementing changes than it had been when it began.
Yukl states that "group forms of participation are unlikely to be effective unless the manager has sufficient skill in managing conflict, facilitating constructive problem solving, and dealing with common process problems that occur in groups" (p. 112). Either a leader with facilitative leadership skills should have been named in place of this leader or leadership training before the project began and constructive coaching as the project developed should have been provided to him. Instead, he was left on his own to produce results and he relied on skills which were more appropriate in hierarchal organizations, but proved ineffective in a cross cultural cross functional team. By taking a facilitative leadership role he could have helped the team define its purpose and rules for making decisions and final outcomes, encourage the generation of ideas, help the team make solid recommendations and take a more neutral role in the overall process. The end result would have produced similar recommendations while maintaining country commitment, and improving implementation.
James Gehrke is the President of Magnify Leadership and Development.
After various promotions in Sales, Sales Operations, Training & Development, and Sales Management and Training, he headed Pfizer’s Learning & Development for all of Europe, Canada, Africa, & the Middle East where he was instrumental in the development of a global management curriculum and other training initiatives to enhance organizational effectiveness for over 30,000 employees. He has worked on many high levels, cross functional teams addressing issues such as Field Force Effectiveness, Change Leadership, Leader Behavior Development, Executive Coaching and many others.
Since starting his own training company, James has developed and trained both public and private leadership, coaching, targeting and territory management sessions for hundreds of participants in various industries. James is bilingual and can teach in both English and Spanish.
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