EGADE MBM: Leadership and Organizational Behavior MOOC - Individual Practice Peer Evaluation

1. Gustavo Alejandro Martínez Calderón November 10, 2018
A01191850
Individual Practice with Peer Evaluation
Topic: A leadership crisis situation that you were involved in.
1. What happened? (Background, brief description of events, specific leadership actions)
What were the results? (Real or potential. Try to include both positive and negative
possibilities. Even if the event seemed clearly good or bad, consider unintended
consequences.)
It all started in August of the year 2017. I had just formalized my first company, which was
a result of a spin-off of my dad's business, where I decided to start producing plastic lids for
20 liter drums in an area available within my dad's factory. The first week of operations was
probably the hardest week of my life. On the first Monday, I had two labor workers at my
command, with the support of the plant engineer, and I told them specifically the tasks they
had to do during the week, along with the deliverables and the goals they had to fulfill. I
knew that being the founder of this new company must have a definite profile, where I let
my skills speak for themselves. From the beginning I wanted to show that the most
important values for our organizational culture were: Honesty, Respect, Learning,
Commitment, Responsibility, Resilience and Pro Activity; but it seemed like I told them the
opposite. Over the hours I saw the lack of efficiency and commitment they had with their
tasks, where I told them that they had to do one thing, and they did another. As a result, I
ended up not only with a week far from the expected profitability, but also disappointing my
first clients.
The results of this, as mentioned above, was lack of commitment, motivation, productivity
and respect, which ended with a low profitability for the company; but on the positive side,
I am grateful for this situation, where I learned something new and I was sure that it would
not happen again.
2. Why did this happen? (Consider all possible factors, including the people and the
situation)
Later on I discovered that the root of this problem was simple: I hired employees who had
worked for my dad, so they didn’t like a change in their boss, where they didn’t know me
well enough and they had just discovered that a 23-year-old was now giving them new
orders.

2. 3. What class concepts are relevant to this situation? (Mention at least one concept from
class and how they can be used to interpret the situation.)
I consider that the concept of the class that most relates to this case is the personality issue,
which is defined depending on each situation. I understood that I had to strengthen my
personality, which started weak in a situation where the demands were not so present, the
workers felt empowered in a bad way, they felt they were above me. By strengthening the
situation, the demands of the environment began to shape the behavior. There began to be
a high labor specialization, a culture with very strong organizational norms and much better
results. As a matter of fact, I applied this theory in my situation, and in a couple of weeks I
had improved the company's profitability from 10% to 50%.
4. What did you learn from this? (Broader lessons that might apply to other situations or
problems.)
I learned why those workers felt the way they did, where later on I understood that if they
did not change their behavior or their mentality, they had to be changed for workers who
did not know my father, this way they would have respected me as their leader and would
have facilitated teamwork, improving the organizational environment and therefore
increasing productivity.