The scenario for the analysis
Your department has fallen behind on production of a new product and is unable to keep up with demand. The company executive believes lack of motivation and ineffective training to be the major factors contributing to the team’s slow progress and poor quality of the finished product. The executive has selected you to examine the problem and create a training plan to address the situation
The plan for addressing a problem
The Tesla Company located in Palo Alto, CA has been known as a successful car manufacturer for quite long. The company has been doing relatively well up until recently when the organization started defaulting on its deadlines and delivering its products in not as timely manner as it used to. As a recent interview with one of the company’s representatives shows, the leaders of the firm acknowledge the existence of the problem, but have not yet defined the further avenues for improving Tesla’s performance.
On the one hand, the issues that Tesla has been facing over the past year can be attributed to the obstacles related to accommodating in the environment of global economy. On the other hand, Tesla has been the world leader for quite a while, which means that the organization should have developed an efficient system of managing its key processes in the specified environment.
A closer overview of the company’s mechanism has shown that the staff lacks motivation significantly, as the company has been focused on customer satisfaction, leaving the rest of its stakeholders out of the picture.
The Tesla Company has a team of highly qualified experts working in the corresponding departments of the organization. Tesla’s structure can be considered rather rigid, with a specific set of rules and regulations and a specific approach towards the distribution of roles and responsibilities within it. Traditionally defined a vertical, this structure defines the stakeholders involved in the case.
Particularly, one must mention that the current crisis, which the company will have to deal with as soon as possible, affects the company’s leaders, its managers, employees, investors and customers. More importantly, the influence, which the changes in question have on the stakeholders listed above, are reciprocal; in other words, the people belonging to each of the groups above affect the change, therefore, promoting a specific model for the company to follow.
Although the issues, which the organization has to deal with at present, can be viewed as rather diverse, they all seem to point at the same problem that needs to be addressed as soon as possible. Particularly, the leadership approach, which the head of the Tesla Company has adopted in order to managing the firm, is incompatible with the needs of the organization and its staff.
The above-mentioned goal presupposes that the entire set of values, which the organization is guided by presently, as well as the key patterns for organizational behavior, will have to be altered. Indeed, the Tesla staff could use a major improvement in the principles of organizational behavior and the set of values that it promotes to its employees.
The transition from one behavioral pattern to another, as well as the adoption of a new set of values can be promoted to the staff by incorporating an appropriate adult learning theory. Specifically, the necessity to employ the approach that will help the staff transform from being unconsciously unskilled to being unconsciously skilled deserves to be mentioned.
As it has been stressed above, the key goal for the organization to attain to presently is to enhance the production cycle and supply the customers with the stated amount of goods. The specified goal, however, can only be reached one several objectives are completed. First and most obvious, the very design of the organization’s approach towards organizational behavior, human resource management and leadership needs to be redesigned.
New patterns of organizational behavior based on the principles of corporate social responsibility will have to be established. The aforementioned objective, in its turn can only be accomplished once the staff is motivated enough to excel in their performance and has a substantial behavioral model to follow. The model, in its turn, can be provided by the leader of the company or the managers thereof.
Once the basic principles of the transformative leadership approach are promoted within the company, the staff is likely to accept the new values and the model that the company will suggest them to adopt eagerly. However, for the employees to accept the new values even faster, Tesla managers will have to promote the concept of corporate social responsibility within the organization. CSR will create the environment that will facilitate further change.
When determining the direction for the company to evolve in, one must admit that the members of Tesla Motor are going to face major obstacles on their way to improving their staff’s performance and motivation rates. To be more exact, the fact that the company will have to face certain financial issues deserves to be brought up. Because of the need to invest into the redesign of the company’s values and, therefore, invest into its staff by introducing certain incentives, Tesla Motors will need to cut a range of costs.
When choosing the area, which the firm could consider as the possibility of saving for the needs of corporate values redesign and the encouragement of the staff, the logistics department should be listed among the key opportunities. By choosing different transportation options, scheduling the key transportation processes in a more accurate manner, etc., Tesla will avoid major expenditures and at the same time manage uphold to its quality standards.
Planning Matrix: Drop in the pace of the company’s performance (Problem)