Chris Peterson at DSS Consulting Essay

This part discussed the events that occurred during a commute in DSS Consultings organizational structure. Three retired aim district administrators established DSS Consulting during the late 1990s. The company offered administrative support to pocket-sized school districts located in spite of appearance the mid-west and mountain west role. They specialized in handling the negotiating of labor agreements as well as implementation of long-lived system solutions designed to enable those organizations to run effectually.The firm experient a signifi smoket degree of success during their early years, which was primarily attributed to the founders personal relationships within each school district that utilized their function. The pick out for the services offered by DSS grew quickly given the changing dynamic of ch exclusivelyenges face by each district. Some of those challenges related to drop-offs in budgets and subsequent reduction of administrative staff. The firm stru ctured themselves to accommodate the change in services needs of their customers. As a result, DSS designed an organizational structure that consisted of the intravenous feeding areas of specialization Procurement and Systems, Information Technology, Contract Negotiation and Facilities Planning.By the mid-2000s, DSS experienced some significant changes in their organizational structure and their customer base. It was during this condemnation that the founders of the company reduced the amount of time they were spending in customer engagement and relying upon the expertise of the management team up ups for each specialized area. As a result, a gap was executed surfacing the need for a strategy for attracting and retaining freshlyly business. This would require adapting their service offerings to meet the demands of rapidly changing market place base. These factors conduct to a halt in the firms growth and coerce the company to redefine the organizational structure to remai n a competitor.The severalize issues of this case involved successfully redesigning the firms strategy, implementation of those changes magical spell maintaining their level of success. The firm would need to realign their management structure and create functional teams to design, contract and implement product offerings that would appeal to an expanded market (i.e. larger school districts). A major consideration for the firm was how to chance upon this goal and maintain the level of commitment from employees as change in any form can be a intimidating task.A new management structure was determined and Meg Cooke was prescribed the Chief Operating Officer of DSS. Ms. Cooke and the Board of Directors do the decision to withdraw a new structure that created cross-functional teams each delegate to a particular region for which they would design and create products for customers specific to their region that could say-soly be marketed to additional regions with similar deman ds. Based on my review of the case, the major issues set can be categorized as communication, lead, organizational culture and organizational change.CommunicationThe manner in which the new strategy was communicated at all levels of the organization appeared to lack a clear concise message which outlined the redesigned strategy, new organizational structure and a detailed implementation image to achieve the desired results. The communication of these changes wasnt handled in the most efficient manner and subsequently not received by all employees in a favourable manner. Study results that turn in been published by the University of Pittsburghs Katz Business School have indicated that effective communication skills have move one of the most important factors when recruiters are screening candidates for potential managerial positions. Both Ms. Cooke and Ms. Peterson failed to communicate in all phases of the organizational change. Although it appeared that Ms. Cooke met on a regu lar basis with other department leaders, she and Ms. Peterson never had regularly scheduled planning meetings or informal weekly check-ins to ensure that she and her team were on target for successfully delivering the teams objectives.Although, Ms. Peterson communicated and fostered open, collaborative conversations with her team, she failed to communicate with her manager to ensure that she soundless expectations for herself as the leader and for her team. Successful communication is only achieved when the sender and receiving system of information have the same understanding of the information presented. (See Figure 1) For example, when Chris Peterson was assigned to lead her team in delivering new products that would appeal to larger districts within and outside of her designated region. She received the message as create/design new product offerings that would appeal to districts within the southwest region.LeadershipThe style of leadership varies with e real undivided. I t has been stated that todays successful leaders have created in their organizations an atmosphere where every employee believes in management, their strategy and the importance of their individual contributions in achieving the organizations goal. Blake Moutons Managerial Grid is a stupefy using in identifying leadership style that is based on the pattern that there are two conductal dimensions concern for people which can be define as the degree to which leaders are witting of and consider the needs of their staff, their skill sets and development potential when making decisions near specific tasks to be completed. The second dimension is concern for production and is defined as the degree to which leaders place importance on objectives, capacity and production specifically what it takes to meet the desired result.Based on these definitions, I would classify Ms. Cookes driving leadership behaviour dimension to be in the latter category of concern for production and Ms. Peter sons as concern for people. It was evident that Ms. Cookes leadership style resulted in a disorganized and poorly motivated organization. Her lack of leadership to Ms. Peterson resulted in the team being led in the direction of focusing their efforts on a project that would not be approved. Ms. Peterson clearly valued the skills of each team member as well as taking extensive travel to ensure that a collaborative, innovative environment existed for her team to design and develop a new product offering for the districts in the southwest region that would meet their needs.Organizational Culture and Organizational ChangeThe culture that exists within any organization plays a vital role in the behaviour and actions of employees. Organizational culture as defined McLean and Marshall is a prayer of traditions, values, policies, beliefs and attitudes that constitute a pervasive context for everything we do and think in an organization. Based on this definition, DSSs original organiza tional structure could be classified as so-called Power Culture (Handy, 1993). This culture is normal for small entrepreneurial organizations similar to DSS, where the founders had a strong influence and contend a central role in managing the company and securing contracts from their school district contacts.These types of cultures rely heavily on trust, personal communication and empathy. The structure is very informal and there are few rules and guidelines in this culture. However, the changes implemented at DSS to redefine their strategy forced a culture change as well. The organizational structure changed from functional to a more structured hyaloplasm type. The appointment of the COO position shifted the organizational culture from the personal synergetic environment to one of project and task oriented nature. This shift made implementation of the new strategy increasingly more difficult as this was new to everyone at all levels of the organization.