The company was facing issues with a high-profile experimental project falling behind its milestones. The quality manager was taking too long to complete conformity audits required to progress to the next milestone. The quality manager was replaced by the author to address the problem. Upon investigating, the author discovered the quality inspection team of 6 people tasked with audits was overworked, stressed, and frustrated. They lacked proper training and clear responsibilities. Leadership had failed to address the team's needs, causing apathy and reduced performance. By listening to the team's concerns and collaborating to improve processes, the author was able to repair team morale and get the project back on track.

1. Company General Use
A leadership crisis that I was involved in
What happened?
My company has a high-profile experimental project that, at the time, was halfway through its
projected completion time but only a quarter way through its activity milestones. Each of these
milestones needed to be verified by a conformity audit to ensure the company had completed all
actions per our company processes. Passing these audits would allow the company to begin working
toward the next milestone with confidence. The dilemma at hand was the quality manager was horribly
slow at completing these audits and when challenged in progress meetings with his delay the response
was there was too much to be reviewed and he needed more people. Leadership eventually made a call
and pulled the quality manager off the project and put me in his place to "Fix" the problem since my
background is in process improvement and quality engineering.
One of the first things I did was learned the full extent of the process, the current team, the
expectation, and the current workload. It was at this point that I discovered the team of 6 people, who
were made up of quality inspectors who were tasked with performing these audits as well as their
inspector responsibilities, were overtasked, stressed, and worn out. The team had never been given
specialized training on how to perform these audits, never given clearly defined responsibilities, and as
they found issues where the process was not followed it fell on them to resolve it. The failures of
leadership to properly address the project had caused the team frustrations that led them to fall into
habits of production deviance.
Why did this happen?
The project and team’s failures are largely caused by leadership not properly addressing their
responsibilities and ignoring the teams job attitude. The team that was chosen to work this project was
not properly trained to perform the expected auditing tasks. They were also expected to perform the
auditing tasks as well as their hired responsibilities and were left to their own devices to resolve any
issues they came across. This caused stress from conflicting demands as they jumped back and forth
between their inspector and auditor roles, and role ambiguity from not fully understanding what was
expected from them as auditors.
What class concepts are relevant to this situation?
As the team’s frustrations grew with little to no resolution in sight, they began to become
apathetic which negatively impacted their job attitude until they began to give less and less to the
success of the project. Their production deviance was a cry for help as it was not being resolved but

2. Company General Use
instead ignored by their current management. Unfortunately, their management was perceiving the
team’s poor performance as counterproductive work behavior and was seeking more people so he can
replace the team that was performing poorly and pushing against him.
What did you learn from this?
The team wanted to be heard and given the opportunity to succeed. Although many of them
were tired from the emotional battle, taking the opportunity to listen to their concerns and resolve their
issues was the first step to repairing the team and putting the project back on course. Although the
additional training was welcomed, it was the team collaborations to find a better way to perform the
audits that really allowed each member to take ownership of their role in the project and feel as if they
were being heard and supported. It was not an overnight change, and we are still not finished, but the
team is more focused, dedicated, and willing to provide solutions knowing that the company, and I, have
no intention of letting them fail.