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1 ACADEMIC RECYCLING COMPANY (ARC)
Ten years ago Sully Truin formed the Academic Recycling Company (ARC) to offer a specialised waste recycling service to schools and colleges. The company has been very successful and has expanded rapidly.
To cope with this expansion, Sully has implemented a tight administrative process for operating and monitoring contracts. This administrative procedure is undertaken by the Contracts Office, who track that collections have been made by the field recycling teams. Sully has sole responsibility for obtaining and establishing recycling contracts, but he leaves the day-to-day responsibility for administering and monitoring the contracts to the Contracts Office. He has closely defined what needs to be done for each contract and how this should be monitored. ‘I needed to do this’, he said, ‘because workers in this country are naturally lazy and lack initiative.
I have found that if you don’t tell them exactly what to do and how to do it, then it won’t get done properly.’ Most of the employees working in the Contracts Office like and respect Sully for his business success and ability to take instant decisions when they refer a problem to him. Some of ARC’s employees have complained about his autocratic style of leadership, but most of these have now left the company to work for other organisations.
A few months ago, ARC was acquired by an international company Scat. Scat intend to leave the management of ARC completely in Sully Truin’s hands but want to integrate its activities into complementary activities carried out by the Scat group.
As part of Scat’s human resource strategy every manager must attend one of Scat’s internal leadership programmes. Scat’s programmes actively advocate and promote a democratic style of management. Sully Truin attended once such course programme as part of the conditions for him retaining his managing directorship of ARC.
The course caused Sully to question his previous approach to leadership. It was also the first time, for three years, that Sully had been out of the office during working hours for a prolonged period of time. However, each night, while he was attending the course, he had to deal with emails from the Contracts Office listing problems with contracts and asking him what action they should take. He became exasperated by his employees’ inability to take actions to resolve these issues.
He discussed this problem with the leaders of Scat’s training programme. They suggested that his employees would be more effective and motivated if their jobs were enriched and that they were empowered to make decisions themselves.
On his return from the course, Sully called a staff meeting with the Contracts Office where he announced that, from now on, employees would have responsibility for taking control actions themselves, rather than referring the problem to him. Sully, in turn, was to focus on gaining more contracts and setting them up.
However, problems with the new arrangements arose very quickly. Fearful of making mistakes and unsure about what they were doing led to employees discussing issues amongst themselves at length before coming to a tentative decision. The operational (field) recycling teams were particularly critical of the new approach. One commented that ‘before, we got a clear decision very quickly. Now decisions can take several days and appear to lack authority.’ The new approach also caused tensions and stress within the Contracts Office and absenteeism increased.
At the next staff meeting, employees in the Contracts Office asked Sully to return to his old management style and job responsibilities. ‘We prefer the old Sully Truin’, they said, ‘problems are again referred up to him. However, he is unhappy with this return to the previous way of working as he feels that this may upset the new company owners. He is also working long hours and is concerned about his health. On top of this, he realises that he has little time for obtaining and planning contracts and this is severely restricting the capacity of the company to expand in order to integrate activities with other parts of the Scat group.
Scat performs a 100 day review of all newly acquired businesses. This 100 day review examines the impact of the acquisition after the first 100 days of Scat ownership. A review of ARC has determined that ARC has yet to achieve integration targets that were set as objectives for the first 100 days post acquisition.
The Scat human resource director is concerned that this may be caused by a poor management style employed by Sully Truin or that perhaps Scat’s own internal training programmes are not as effective as hoped. She believes that the management training course promotes the best approach to leadership, one that she herself employs across all of Scat’s business units.
Required:
You work as a member of the 100 day review team at Scat.Prepare a brief report for the Scat HR director to explain why the change of leadership style at ARC was unsuccessful and whether this reflects a poor approach to Scat’s management training programme. (15 marks)
