Fireart Case Analysis

FireArt Case Analysis

From my point of view, the major factor that cause the current crisis is the lack of Eric’s leadership. He does not have the ability to establish objectives and make decisions. Therefore, instead of resolving the conflicts, he do not really know what to do and just let the conflicts become larger. What is worse, Randy has taken advantage of Eric’s poor leadership by disrupting the meeting, just to show his idea that teamwork is useless. As a named team leader, Eric should responsible for what has happened and try to find the remedy.

The second factor that cause the current crisis is that the team does not have a clear team purpose and working approach. Eric just passed a vague information that from the CEO to his team members, which is “to have a comprehensive plan for strategic realignment”. Consequently, different members have their own understandings of those words, so they just think about their own ideas from their own aspects individually. Therefore, the team members could not reach a consensus, because they are from the different divisions and their knowledge limited the possibility to understand other team members. Eric should not focus too much on forcing all team members to have one consensus. On the other hand, Eric should focus more on making a specific plan for every team member to get things accomplished.

The third factor that cause the current crisis is that the group members focus more on their feelings and past successful experiences rather than the thing they should do now. Eric wants to lead the team depends on his team leading experience as a consultant team leader. Eric does not realize that his team at FireArt is quite different from his consultant team. Firstly, consultant team is formed by several consultants that have the same kind of knowledge and they could understand each other well. The team members at FireArt are from different divisions and they may not understand each other well. Secondly, the consultant team is more like a “leader-driven-working-group” rather than a “team”, the leader of the group assigned the tasks to the group members individually, and each group member could accomplish their task without relying on others. However, for the team at FireArt, many tasks should be get done by the cooperation. Therefore, the experience in the consultant team may not work for the FireArt team. What is more, most of the team members in FireArt team are focusing too much on protecting feelings rather than getting the tasks done. Real teams do not have to get along. They have to get things accomplished.

Alternatives:

For the first alternative, Eric should determine that whether this is a really an opportunity for teamwork or not. If so, Eric should insist his idea that this work could not be accomplished by several individual to work alone. Give specific examples of the problems the company is facing and explain why they could not be solved by individual work. Then help Randy to recognize the value and the need for teamwork. This process mainly gains the awareness of the team members that they are now on the same boat. The boat would sink if they could not work together. That could help the team members, especially Randy, to recognize both the value and necessity for collective work and skills. Then Eric should establish a working and reporting system for team members to get team members adhere to the right track.