CASE STUDY ONE
People afraid to speak there TRUTH.
I have spent most of my career working in Corporates as a consultant. One observation I have made is that generally these environments are based on self preservation. Anything people do or say is firstly put through the filter “is this best for me?”. The companies needs and desires where second.
One of the main reasons I came to this conclusion is as a senior project manager I observed that many people are afraid to speak their truth. One organisation I worked for, people were afraid of the CEO. He would yell and become angry. People would avoid this by making things sound better then they were. Of course, this eventually catches up and makes things worse.
This is one of many examples of where people either do not have the skills to be able to deal with their own emotions (in this case fear of the CEO) and / or the CEO / management do not have enough self-awareness to appreciate how their way of being is impacting others.
CASE STUDY TWO
OWNER LACK OF TIME IN THE BUSINESS
One of my clients spent most of his time away from his business.
When I first met with him, he was very frustrated that the business was not running the way he wanted it to, “why can’t people just do what I want”. After spending some time in his business, I realised that he had three main issues:
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He was rarely there to provide support and guidance to his team
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Nothing was documented
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No training
While for most of us it may seem obvious that these issues where causing his frustration, initially he didn’t want to acknowledge this. His attitude was “I’m paying them, they should just get on with it”.
After a number of careful conversations I was able to help him accept that he was responsible for this situation. Further discussions revelled that while he loves his business he has other priories that were distracting him. We concluded that if he wanted things to change he either needed to priotise the business or find someone to manage it for him.
What he also realised during this process is that by “blaming” his staff he was creating a toxic environment and culture.
CASE STUDY THREE
PROJECT TEAMS NOT WORKING TOGETHER
A lot of my time in corporates was spent as a contract senior project manager, delivering multi-million dollar software and IT Infrastructure projects.
There were two people on one of my co-workers projects that did not get on. This was having a big impact on his project. He eventually sorted out the issue.
We were talking one day and were curious as to how much this situation had cost his project.
Impacts we discussed were:
Disruption to project meetings
Information not being shared
Impact on other team members etc
Time the project manager spent addressing issue etc
We estimated that the inability for these two people to work cost his project around $30,000. The company we were working for had 100 projects going on at anyone time. While not all projects had these issues we both concluded that the hidden costs of the inability of people to get on (lack of emotional intelligence) must be costing the company a significant amount of money.
CASE STUDY FOUR
PEOPLE NOT WANTING TO FACE THE TRUTH
(especially about money)
One of my clients brought and sold wood. After our second coaching session something didn’t feel right. The next time I met with my client we completed a simple cashflow forecast. What this uncovered that within 3 months they would be broke.
This was very hard for them to accept. In the end they did and we devised a plan that enabled them to greatly reduce their costs and run the business from their home.