A Skunk in the Works - Marketing Expert Leading a Skunk Works Team for Intelligent Home and Office S

The Skunk Works Team and its Goals

A Skunk in the Works Sarah is a marketing expert with 15 years of experience. She was recently appointed the team leader for a Skunk Works team.  The team brings together experts in other project-essential areas such as electronics engineers, software designers and production specialists. The team is working on a new concept for intelligent home and office security systems that use artificial intelligence and monitor a myriad of environmental sensors to provide more accurate, reliable, and responsive building security.  Sarah has come from a difficult background. She has learned most of her skills in the workforce.  She has only recently completed an online degree from the Open University.  Her success in the marketing department, mostly due to how well she has nurtured interpersonal relationships, has been noted by the Innovations Division Executive, and he was the one who pushed for her to be appointed a team leader. When she started leading the team, things were running fine. Everyone turned up when they were expected to; they all completed their preparation tasks; and they came to meetings informed and ready to make valuable contributions. However, after three weeks of daily meetings, the situation has started to slip. There are ten members of the group, including Sarah, and she is finding that only half of them arrive on time, and less than a third of them actually do the work they promise to do to prepare for each meeting. Even worse - a divide is starting to occur. The nine other members are communicating with each other, but they are keeping Sarah out of the loop. She feels that she is no longer part of the ‘in-group’, she is losing her authority and senses the team is drifting from the overall goals that were established at the beginning and moving in a direction which seems to be less realistic and is likely to lead to the failure of the project, and this would be a failure that she will have to bear as team leader. One example of this shift in direction is the following: Five days ago, at Sarah’s direction, the team agreed to look into the development of a fully wireless interface using Bluetooth and connecting to sensors using WiFi protocols. Since this was the state-of-the-art, and 90% of their competitors were adapting their products to be fully wireless, Sarah thought that this approach would be essential. However, the nine other members of the team – all males and all in their early twenties, and all of whom graduated from the same university – have created designs that are all hard-wired, and which if adopted would mean that the security systems will have to be installed by professional tradespeople, increasing the cost of implementation greatly. Similar situations have also occurred with technical and design differences that have no practical basis and which go against the ‘state-of-the-art’ strategic approach the company has adopted. Sarah and all members of the team are at the same level in the organisation, so except for the fact that she is the designated team leader, she has no real authority over any of the group’s members. However, she has threatened to report them to the CEO, but the nine other team members don’t seem to believe her, or they just don’t care. Further, they are starting to complain that she doesn’t understand the more complex technical details of the security system, and that her lack of technical know-how is preventing her from seeing the value in their diverted approach. Yesterday, Sarah received an anonymous email from a bizarre Hotmail account called ‘[email protected]’. The email said: “… and you are a really bad leader. You don’t understand the superior brains of engineers, you don’t even understand men. I am going to speak to the CEO and ask him to replace you and vote for a new team leader, someone who gets this project and understands the team-members – all of them.   “… I heard some of the board-members complaining about the team’s lack of progress and lack of direction. They suggested that Sam is a natural leader, and that Sam should be selected to lead the team.” Sarah was shaken by this. Was it a personal attack on her? Or was it a genuine concern – was Sam a better leader? She decided to compare their different leadership styles. Comment on the natural leadership styles of Men versus Women. Does Sam fit the expected stereotype of a male leader? Why/why not? [250 words] What can be done to balance Sam’s leadership approach? [250 words]