Alex Sanders Hbr Case
Team Assignment: Alex Sanders Memo
To: Mr. Sam Glass
From: Team 8
Date: March 2nd, 2013
Subject: Alex Sanders
In response to your inquiry regarding Alex Sanders and performance management, we urge you to consider the following recommendations.
Your perception of Alex as a go-getter is absolutely accurate; he has the intellect, drive, and ambition to accomplish goals with great success. In fact, much of the group’s success is correlated with Alex’s involvement. We realize that his personal motivators are compensation, mastery of new tasks, and being spotlighted for his successes. In contrast, your firm is hoping to extract value through increased teamwork, mentorship, and facilitating a more comfortable workplace. Through this juxtaposition, we believe that Landon Care Products should tie a portion of Alex’s compensation and future project designations to his ability to improve in the following metrics: overall team incorporation on projects and formal mentoring process to direct reports. This alteration will incentivize Alex to delegate work effectively and trust his team members, while ensuring that they are continuously coached and can extract value from his expertise. We realize that Alex may not be entirely welcoming of this change initially, but if you raise his achievable compensation level and designate a future promotion – both of which are contingent upon his improvement – Alex will create positive new habits. In terms of performance management processes, we believe that the 360-degree method not a worthwhile means of performance feedback. The data is often flawed because it is not an objective measure: employees subconsciously evaluate their associates’ performance in relation to the benchmark set by their own performance. As such, the data can be inherently flawed. We recommend that Landon Care Products use a balanced scorecard system to capitalize on the multi-dimensional performance measurement. This will give Alex and his
To: Mr. Sam Glass
From: Team 8
Date: March 2nd, 2013
Subject: Alex Sanders
In response to your inquiry regarding Alex Sanders and performance management, we urge you to consider the following recommendations.
Your perception of Alex as a go-getter is absolutely accurate; he has the intellect, drive, and ambition to accomplish goals with great success. In fact, much of the group’s success is correlated with Alex’s involvement. We realize that his personal motivators are compensation, mastery of new tasks, and being spotlighted for his successes. In contrast, your firm is hoping to extract value through increased teamwork, mentorship, and facilitating a more comfortable workplace. Through this juxtaposition, we believe that Landon Care Products should tie a portion of Alex’s compensation and future project designations to his ability to improve in the following metrics: overall team incorporation on projects and formal mentoring process to direct reports. This alteration will incentivize Alex to delegate work effectively and trust his team members, while ensuring that they are continuously coached and can extract value from his expertise. We realize that Alex may not be entirely welcoming of this change initially, but if you raise his achievable compensation level and designate a future promotion – both of which are contingent upon his improvement – Alex will create positive new habits. In terms of performance management processes, we believe that the 360-degree method not a worthwhile means of performance feedback. The data is often flawed because it is not an objective measure: employees subconsciously evaluate their associates’ performance in relation to the benchmark set by their own performance. As such, the data can be inherently flawed. We recommend that Landon Care Products use a balanced scorecard system to capitalize on the multi-dimensional performance measurement. This will give Alex and his