Is the rookie ready?

On reading the case and the readings provided with it, my initial thoughts regarding the case were completely unfavorable. There was an ongoing management crisis in Driscoll Software on the event of an experienced and reputed manager, Alessandra Sandovat resigning the company due to her future ambitions and conflict of behaviors with the leader, Tim O’Connell. What happened after this incident made me decide that both the leadership and managerial skills exhibited in the case weren’t up to the mark. It was the time when Kristen Hammersmith, a very brilliant programmer at Driscoll was promoted to the managerial role which was left vacant by the resignation of her then boss, Alessandra. No doubt Kristen was a talented programmer, but then does it mean that a person good at one skill will be equally good at the other? In the meantime, Driscoll’s old client, Hybara Casinos who had moved out of the deal last year due to expensive software came back to Driscoll to fix their existing cheap setup which doesn’t work reliably. And the deadline given to Tim was of only two weeks. Tim accepted the proposal and asks Kristen to take charge of this project despite the vacation period impending soon. Kristen thought it was a bad idea to accept the project because of the tight schedule and also most of the resources will be on leave. However, so selfish was Tim for his company and the revenue that he didn’t show any empathy for Kristen and her team and straight away struck a deal with the client.
Obviously, Kristen didn’t showcase any of the good managerial skills at the helm. Firstly, she blindly followed Tim’s order without even asking about the criticality of the project. Also, she fell into a myth that being a manager she had to control her team. Without having earned the respect of her team, she was expecting them to be very responsible. She threw orders directly to the team about the project timeline and not even shared her own thoughts and ideas. In fact she