Garden Depot

Garden Depot is a profitable small family-owned business. However, one of its three core business segment, the landscaping division is on the verge of ‘self-destruction' mainly due to poor management. The ‘self-destruction' mode started when Derek Sinclair, son-in-law of the owner was appointed as head of the landscaping division in 2007.

Sinclair was hired by his father-in-law to lead the division despite having no prior exposure in the landscaping industry or had no previous management experience. Sinclair's limitation has forced Janice Bowman, the office manager to pick up some of Sinclair's responsibilities; namely, invoicing duties, on her own accord to ensure her own duties of inventory planning and review of customers' payment are not affected.

The root causes of Garden Depot's problems are more than just poor person-job fit. Poor organisational commitment, motivation, lack or organisational rules and procedures including clear job description allow Sinclair to remain slack on his work responsibilities and Jayme, one of his subordinates to deviant norms by working on his personal job assignments during office hour. In addition, poor leadership methodology of ‘hands off approach' which is not suitable for small family-owned business and lack of communication flow also aggravated the situation.

A team lead by Murray should be formed to solve the above problems. On-the-job training and mentoring programs should be provided to ground staff on regular basis while team members comprising mostly managers must be given expertise training when needed. Organisational rules, policies, restrictions and penalties against employees who deviant norms must be established, documented and communicated to all workers. Customer-centric culture ought to be established. Finally, Murray as a leader needs to start ‘walking about', observing and talking to staff working on ground to feel, understand and