SUBJECT: LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

TOPIC: BUILDING FRONT LINE TEAM LEADERS AT LARGE DEFENSE

CONTRACTING COMPANY (CASE 3)

SUBMITTED TO: DR. MONOO JOHN SIR

SUBMITTED BY: GROUP 3

YASHIKA KALRA 20MBAR0180

ERAGAM JEEVANA SOWJANYA 20MBAR0527
MANVITH.A 20MBAR0541
SURBHI ROY 20MBAR0500
VARSHINI.M 20MBAR0311
SAHITHYA SN 20MBAR0554
VIVEK.S 20MBAR0658s
Building Frontline Team Leaders at a Large Defense Contracting Company

CASE STUDY ANALYSIS:

IMPORTANT CHARACTERISTICS/FEATURES:

1. Ability to Adapt & Learn

Adaptability is a crucial quality in managers and supervisors. In today’s dynamic environment,

adaptability is an essential skill for managers to have to keep pace with shifting technological
and work environment changes. To pinpoint adaptability during the talent acquisition process,
First-person recommends measuring three specific skills: creative thinking, a forward-facing
mentality, and open-mindedness.

2. Business Knowledge

Knowing and being trained in the principles of your business allows your leaders to understand
your business’s priorities and strategy, and how best to help contribute to achieving them. This
way, leaders not only have the ability to connect their work and the work of their teams to the
vision of the organization, hence they can more effectively demonstrate to their direct reports
how their work contributes to the organization’s overall success.

3. Strategic Goal Setting

Once leaders know what’s important to your organization and why, they become better equipped
to develop strategies that focus the efforts of their team on what matters. Whether the goal is to
increase sales, better quality of service, or a lower average handle time, once defined
performance standards have been set, leaders can let their teams know what is expected of them,
and how they will be evaluated.

4. Task Execution to Achieve Milestones

When goals are established, leadership can set milestones for their teams, then monitor progress
and give them direction on how to achieve those milestones. Conversely, managers need to be
able to observe when progress is stalling or goals are in danger of not being met, so they can
course-correct in a timely manner.

5. Motivating & Inspiring Others

One of the most critical qualities in effective mangers is not the ability to dictate, but to facilitate.
Managers who act as monarchs will achieve significantly less desirable results than those who
have both technical and soft skills necessary to successfully lead their teams. Managers should
be focused on recognizing their employees and providing their reports with meaningful feedback
so their team not only know where they can improve, but what they’re doing well. At the end of
the day, most people in the workplace wants to be treated with dignity and respect, and to know
that what they’re doing actually matters.

CHALLENGES/ ISSUES:

 The company changed its fundamental organizational structure, for its employees. The
large defense contracting company separation resulted in two public companies to focus
on certain business segments and remove conflicts of interest to increase each company’s
market access.
 The split resulted in a shift of organizational structure to a matrix organization,
representing a significant internal change
 A matrix organizational structure is a workplace format in which employees report to two
or more managers rather than one manager. This leads to confusion in the employees
 In matrix organizational structure the Managerial roles may not be clearly defined and the
decision-making process can be slowed down
 Moving to the matrix organizational structure made the employees to adjust their new
roles and responsibilities which required collaboration and integration across the
enterprise
 The main challenge the defense contracting company is changing the internal structure of
the company which leads to confusion in the roles and responsibility and increase in the
work load.

SOLUTIONS/RECCOMENDATIONS:

 Foundations of Leadership
It helps participants understand what drives employees and how to move business objectives
forward. This core module set the stage for the program by teaching the fundamentals of
engagement and ensuring that leaders understood their ability to affect the contributions and
satisfaction of the people on their teams. Blessing White’s research on the needs of technical
people and the challenges leading them, established credibility and provided a common language
for the rest of the program. Building trust, listening actively, and asking strategic questions were
the skills that were taught and then practiced and applied in subsequent modules. The
communication strategy helped leaders plan for and conduct conversations with the members of
their teams. These skills, strategies, and tools were reinforced through real-world scenarios
brought through in subsequent modules.

 Setting Goals
Leaders can increase their contributions to the organization by setting and supporting goals with
their teams. Participants learned how goal setting is tied to engagement, discussed different types
of goals, and then focused on how to make goals as effective as possible by working with the
SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reasonable, Time-Bound) framework, applying the
strategy to a goal-setting conversation and then completing a real-world skill practice.

 Giving Feedback
This section taught how to leverage high performance and correct performance issues with clear,
meaningful feedback. In this module, participants examined the power of feedback, exploring
different types of feedback, and then learning best practices to consider when providing
feedback. Leaders spent time learning about how to best deliver difficult feedback and then
planned for and practiced a performance strategy conversation that they needed to have with one
of their team members.

 Influencing Others
Leaders can create buy-in and advance ideas by building strong relationships and influencing
strategically. Participants defined what influencing means and discussed the different situations
where they need to influence others on the job. After learning more about the characteristics that
make an effective influencer, participants learned specific influencing skills and how to
communicate benefits. Leaders applied what they learned by participating in a game-based
lesson to “pitch” to others in the room.