David Fletcher Case Study

Why did Fletcher’s first attempt to build a team fail?

When the environment for portfolio management changed and as Fletcher began being overwhelmed with research, he sought to create a team of analysts that could assist him with his work. Fletcher failed to build this team on his first attempt as a result of several causes. There were multiple mistakes that Fletcher made that can be seen in his interactions with people. The first was his assistant Whitley which he had a close relationship with. Before Fletcher hired Doyle, he did it hastily without consulting Whitley. The lack of consent and thought for how he would fit into the company’s culture showed when tension grew between Doyle and Whitley. This led to unproductive work as time and effort was spent on trying to resolve the issue instead of focusing on their work. To make matters worse, Fletcher failed to resolve the conflict by taking a passive approach. Fletcher mentioned that he did not actively try to resolve the conflicts which led to the conflict being dragged out all the way until Doyle left the firm. Fletcher only hypothesized about what the problem was when he said that Whitley wanted the attention. He was wrong and didn’t see that it was clearly Doyle and Whitley were not compatible together on a team. Even though they didn’t cross paths often, when they did both of them just got frustrated. This became such a problem for Whitley that she went to Lodge first and it was Lodge that got Fletcher to sit down with Whitley to talk about her issues. Even after that, Whitley was still discouraged so Jenkins had to step in to remediate the situation. This shows that by taking a passive approach to helping his analysts, Fletcher lost trust in even one of his closest friends in the company. This lack of trust was also shown when Whitley told Kindred about resigning. Despite all of Fletcher’s and Jenkins’s efforts, Whitley eventually left the firm. A perfect example of how Fletcher did not properly