a) Assess Pierre Frenkel’s first three months in Moscow?

Has he managed to establish himself

as a COO and a change agent? How effective are his actions.

Let’s break the assessment into two categories: his successes so far and his failures so far.

Success
 After 2 months of struggle he was able to convince Nadia Abramova, HR manager to hire a
candidate who can help him lead the subsidiary’s turnaround.
 He did a good job in at least understanding the problem within the office, few are:-
- The organisation structure in this particular subsidiary is bad, almost all LoB’s(Line of
Business) are working in silos, hence widening the communication gap.
- Everything is micromanaged by the MD. He keeps his informers at every level to get the
information he needs.
- He could understand the behaviour of common people and how Soviet hangover and
national pride is still defining the behaviour of people. And the same he could map with
the behaviour in some of the employees within the organisation. We can see this when
Lebedev tries to provoke employees by reminding them of Russian talent over
European.
- He tried to bring the change in people as well, as it can be seen that he tried to influence
Nadia to help him as it is good for the company and in turn he will help her get close
connections with the Managers in Zurich.
 Even though he knew it is very difficult for him to turn things around single handed without
the support of employees and his boss Lebedev, he kept trying. He kept engaging with
employees and had consistent communication with them to understand them better, he
also went to have a dinner with one of the employee to try to influence them in a good way.
 He had gained enough knowledge about the organisation, culture and behaviour of the
people in the office, now he is in a better position to come up with a solution to tackle the
issue.

Failure
 He could not create a nice bond with Sergei Lebedev his MD, from the beginning Lebedev
didn’t want any outsider in the office. As having a bond with MD is the most important thing
for him to achieve the goal, he failed to do so.
 Many employees still don’t like him, initially they showed passive resistance like they would
not show up in the meetings, they would not support him, they would not speak up, they
would not write the minutes and etc, rumours about his managing style and his worth in the
company started as they were questioning his achievements in the past 2.5 months.
 It took him almost 2 months to convince Nadia to hire a candidate for him.
 Even after 3 months of his appointment to the Russian subsidiary, it had already missed the
first quarters objective under him.
 He could not bring people together to one objective which is to improve the condition of the
company in the region.
 He is not in the winning position even after 3 months, i.e he did not establish a good
relationship with employees and his boss Lebedev, he still needs to do a lot before he can
even think of organisational restructure because if he do it without having a good repo with
 them, he will face a huge resistance and backlash from them and bring a great damage to
the company.

He was not able to establish himself as a respected COO within the office yet as not many
people were fond him at present. The change which he wanted to bring withing the
organisation was also not achieved, so he definitely did not establish himself as a change
agent. He could not bring people to work together and achieve the organisations goal as
they were still stuck in politics.

His actions are not effective, as he achieved little to no success as of now, he was not able to
win the hearts of people to bring changes because if he tries to bring a change while being
an unpopular person in the company he will face with lot of resistance. He could not
establish a good relationship with his boss. He was not able to bring people to the meeting
successfully as many of them skipped it, employees were not giving their best towards the
company. People in Russia are highly talented, but he was not able to tap to their potential
and convert that to company’s profit.
He saw a mild success with Nadia, as she agreed to his request of hiring someone who will
help him.

b) What obstacles does he face, and how can he remove them? What must be done to improve
business results?

The biggest obstacle he is facing is the hatred he is receiving from his boss Lebedev, as
Lebedev wanted his own people to be in the organisation so that no one can question him,
but the Directors from Zurich sent Frankel there. To remove this obstacle, he needs to start
having a positive conversation with Lebedev regularly and make him understand the
potential of the Russian market and how they can tap the market together. He should try to
inspire Lebedev to achieve the targeted goal by making him feel involved in all the decisions
taken. Just like he could convince Nadia by telling her that he can improve her relationship
with the Managers at Zurich, he can do the same with Lebedev.

He faced resistance from the employees within the company. They were not being honest to
him, they were avoiding him and his meetings. There were rumours that people are raising
questions over his achievements in the past 2.5 months since he joined the office. To
remove this obstacle he needs to conduct small presentations regularly about company’s
performance, their plans, their vision and etc. this will make the employees feel included
and hence igniting the spark of inspiration to work towards achieving the goal. He should
reorganize the organisational structure, as teams are working in silos the information is
always hidden which is hindering the growth of company. With the reorganisation the aim
should be to improve the cross-team communication which will allow free flow of
information.

Cultural differences, people in Russia are still heavily influenced by Soviet way of doing
businesses, being close to bosses, trying to have connections with politicians and influential
people, corruption, heavily dependent on government policies and because of all this they
are generally not very good at managerial decisions. It is a very difficult task to remove this
obstacle, he can try to influence them to be frank, open and to be more productive by
 showing the same through his attitude. This behaviour of his might make few people want to
change themselves like him.

Language, not everyone in the office can speak and understand English. Therefore it was
difficult for him to communicate freely with them. That is also one of the reason he wanted
to hire a native candidate. To remove this obstacle he needs to hire a local candidate as he is
already planning to, he should also try to learn the language and show the people in the
office that he is putting an effort to learn their language. This might make the team little
empathetic towards him, which might help him win their hearts.

Things to do to improve business results are:-

If we see H-IT in general, they are performing well in all other places. It shows that they have
a good system set in the organisation. But Russian subsidiary is not able to get similar results
which reflects in the organisational structure there. Teams here work in silos, lack of
transparency, micromanagement by Lebedev, lack of communication all these gives rise to
corruption and misuse of power. So to improve the business results firstly the organisation’s
structure needs to be changed, it needs to be changed to what all other H-IT subsidiary’s are
embracing. It is difficult to do, given the fact that culturally Russian people and their mindset
is little different than people in the West and other regions, but can be achieved with
incremental and consistent changes within the organisation.
So the changes should be, removing silo structure and create a system where information is
easily available and freely moving within the teams. The KPIs and objectives needs to be
communicated with the employees regularly to keep them motivated. Performance based
rewards system should be introduced. An employee exchange program where few selected
employees from this office go and work for European or other subsidiary’s for few weeks to
learn their practices, this will also improve the relation between these subsidiaries.

c) Consider all stakeholders and constituencies. Who should be in Frankel’s coalition? Who
should be ignored or neutralized?

People needs to be in coalition.

 People in the management sitting in Zurich, including President of EMEA who was
his supervisor earlier, as these are the most important people in the organisation,
having them to his side will help him in taking decisions with a degree of freedom.
 Nadia is a very important member of the organisation as she is the head of HR. She
is also very close to Lebedev which will help Frankel to influence him through her.
 The candidate who will be joining him as his assistant soon which he wants to hire.
Lebedev wanted to appoint his candidate in this position as he will act as his
informer, so it is really important for Frankel to have this new guy in his coalition.
 The employees who need change, all the employees who are excited about work
and want to achieve organisation goals. As these are the individuals who want to
change and are aligned to the goal of the company, they will act as a change agent.
 Ignored or neutralized

 He should definitely neutralize his relationship with his present boss Lebedev as he
is a powerful individual in the office and he cannot do much without the approval of
his boss. He can make or break things within the office. Frankel should strategically
try to neutralize him and later can add him to his coalition.
 All the employees who hate him and are trying to ignore him. He should not focus
on them too much.

d) Advise Frankel to what to say to the bosses above him who are demanding faster action.

Frankel should clearly explain them the bottlenecks he faced till now, the resistance he got
from Lebedev and other employees and how it is affecting his progress. He should list out all
the findings he have, like Russian culture, lack of managerial skills of people here and etc.
This will help the management to understand the problem faced by him which will help him
to justify him missing targets, and they might suggest some solutions to him which will help
him to tackle the problem he is facing. He should talk about the insights he learned through
the information he gathered so far. Now he should tell them his plans for next steps and
decide the timeline to achieve the same. In this way he would have clearly stated all the
problems he is currently facing and how he is planning to tackle them and finally what is he
planning to achieve in coming days to get closer to the goal.