Addressing_Challenges_of_Groups_and_Teams_Final

Addressing Challenges of Groups and Teams LDR/531 Organizational Leadership August 11, 2010 Addressing Challenges of Groups and Teams WorldCom was once in the top five of long distance providers until they filed the largest bankruptcy ever in U.S history (Beltran 2002). However, WorldCom lacked effective leadership and a management team to back its steady growth. WorldCom’s needs included an active management team to help develop a clear vision of the company’s goals, motivate the organization to meet these goals, monitor results, and resolve the problems the company was facing with rapid growth. If WorldCom developed and implemented an effective management and leadership training program, it is possible that it could have lead them to success and less likely hood of record breaking failure. As a group, Team A created a training plan that would have provided more opportunities for WorldCom to better its collaboration, communication, and its growing conflicts. This paper will review the following ineffective behaviors, processes and practices that aided in WorldCom’s failure, communicating and collaborating effectively, and provide beneficial training ideas that would have helped the leaders at WorldCom remain successful, and discuss how the training plan could have improved the management within WorldCom. Ineffective Behaviors Process and Practices To develop a successful training plan, identify the issues within WorldCom’s leadership and management. The first issue was to determine which activities the management team considered to be norms. According to Robbins and Judge (2007), “norms are the acceptable standards of behavior within a group that are shared by group members.” In the case of WorldCom’s demise, CEO Bernie Ebbers and CFO Scott Sullivan’s fraudulent behavior was an example of unethical behavior norms. The ineffective fraudulent behavior that was displayed by Bernie Ebbers and his CFO’s centralized structure was accepted because it was unknown to the rest of the companies’ associates. The two committed fraud through unethical accounting practices and lying to industry analysts (Reeves, 2005). Ebbers actions covered up the fact that WorldCom was losing money which inflated share prices. Leadership at WorldCom, due to its centralized structure, was not a team. There was no communication or collaboration regarding mergers or acquisitions. Ebbers entrepreneurial leadership style focused on growing the company as fast as possible and not worrying about any risk to the company. Contracts were signed and business acquisitions were made with what was best for his pockets and not what was best for the company. The main reasons behind WorldCom’s collapse were accounting misstatements, failure of upper management/ board of directors, and fraud. Finally another issue that contributed to the failure of WorldCom was the lack of decision making process. The absence of HR management, structure and authority by executive management afforded CEO Ebbers and CFO Sullivan the opportunity to commit fraud. The rapid growth of WorldCom, without increasing their HR management team, didn’t allow them to allocate roles within management. Important roles, such as the controller, to follow up on details with in acquisitions and enforce rules or an organizer to provide structure to the team, were not manifested within WorldCom’s leadership and management team. Training The training program developed by Team A focuses on the structure and accountability of the group, team building, conflict resolution and ethical decision making. WorldCom’s management, with the assistance of an outside trainer, would have to define the properties of the groups within the company to help add structure and responsibility. At this point, Team A decided the training plan should instill the vision of integrity of the company in mind of its leaders, employees’ and managers. At this point, incentives would be offered as a reward to the employees that continually exceeded the company’s goals and motivation towards excellence. Second, WorldCom’s leadership and managers would undergo a series of team building exercises to become familiar with one another. The exercises will focus on trust, ethics, loyalty, communication, motivation, and team success opposed to selfish individual success. Thirdly, WorldCom’s leaders will focus on conflict resolution. The leaders at the company will have to identify possible task conflicts, relationship conflicts, process conflict, and know how to resolve them effectively. Additionally, they will learn how to use conflict in a constructive way. Lastly, leaders will have to attend ethics training classes to help design a code of ethics document that will have to be followed by all employees. To increase positive influences, employees will be encouraged to interact with senior level managers. Impact of Training Program According to Yulk (2006), leadership is,” the process of influencing others to understand and agree about what needs to be done and how to do it, and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives”. Every great organization has a sound foundation and the way about going at establishing the foundation is by making everyone function on the same accord with the same ethics, goals, values, and fundamental reasoning. If Bernie Ebbers and WorldCom had established a similar training program above, the company would have offered more structure within the organization and a common vision expected. The team building exercises would have offered a more unified environment and likely would have reduced the likely hood of committing fraud, if he knew of supporters and influential characters motivated toward a common goal furthering the success of WorldCom. Conclusion WorldCom was once in the top five of long distance providers in the world and they lacked proper leadership, conflict management, and ethics training. What happened at WorldCom was more of an ethical problem and falling victim to a centralized structure which expounded on the problem. If WorldCom would have identified its leadership issues and applied the correct training to compensate for the weakness, while providing a clear vision of the company’s goals, and better communication, the company might still be around today. References Beltran, L. (2002). WorldCom files largest bankruptcy ever . CNN/Money, Retrieved from http://money.cnn.com/2002/07/19/news/worldcom_bankruptcy/ Robbins, S. & Judges, T. (2007). Organizational Behavior (12th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education. Yulk, G. (2006). Leaderships in Organizations (6th ed). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.