Reference no: EM133411646

Case Study: Consider this: Sonali, an established leader in the edtech industry, joined EdtoWork, a fairly recent edtech company. She was hired as the Learning Director of its Advantage division, which creates MBA courses for graduate students and provides a completely online learning experience.
She walked into the EdtoWork office, full of positive energy and a bright smile. She asked her way around till she finally locates her manager sitting in a far remote corner of the office. She had expected to be greeted by someone at the reception, but she shrugged off the thought thinking that was how startups functioned. She introduced herself to her manager, Rajeev, who asks her to make herself comfortable. He told her that he was swamped with work and meetings and would catch up later in the day. For now, he wanted her to meet the team and get to know them. With that, he turned his attention back to his computer system, and Sonali was left to fend for herself. She then walked around the office, trying to locate the Advantage team. After some asking around, she finally found the 10 team members. She introduced herself to the team.
Soon, her team's HR, Ashwini, walked up to her and called her inside the conference room. After basic introductions, Ashwini handed her some documents she needed to sign. While getting up to leave the room, Ashwini told Sonali, "By the way, the team is not very excited that they have someone between them and Rajeev. Rajeev is hugely popular with his team and they absolutely adore him. He has been the best-rated manager by all the team members three years in a row. I really hope they treat you well."
Before Sonali could react, Ashwini had left the room.
Soon after, Sonali got her office laptop with the specifications she had requested during the pre-induction process. Waiting for her in her inbox was an hour-long team meeting invite starting at 3 p.m. Since it was close to 1 p.m., she decided to check with her team for lunch. She could see that most of them were preparing to go for lunch. "Can I join you guys for lunch?", she asked them. "Well, we actually go for lunch with the Opportunity team, and they might not feel comfortable if you are around. Why don't you go with Rajeev?", responded one of the team members.
Managing a stiff smile, she walked back to where Rajeev was sitting earlier. Now he was nowhere to be seen. She finally found him in one of the big conference rooms, finishing his lunch alone. Sonali asked him if she could join him for lunch. He waved her in, and they soon started chatting. Rajeev asked her whether she had met the team. She wanted to mention the 'lunch episode,' but before she got the opportunity, Rajeev started telling her about the dedication of each of the team members to the company. He told Sonali that that his only worry was that despite such a smart and dedicated team, the target audience or the students that enrolled into the company's MBA courses were not happy. He mentioned that he felt the courses were not tailor-made for the students. Rajeev confided that the ratings were dipping and the top leadership was not happy and they believed Sonali would be able to crack the puzzle. Sonali promised to do her best.
Sonali walked into the meeting room at 2:57 p.m., only to find it completely deserted. Till 3:10 p.m., there was no sign of anyone. She called Rajeev to make sure she was in the right room. He laughed and told her that he always came in late to meetings so that the team could settle in comfortably before the meeting started. All the team members entered the meeting room at 3:15 p.m. and took another five minutes to settle down. The meeting started at 3:20 p.m.
Rajeev began the meeting by asking Luna, the project coordinator for Advantage, to present the previous week's data regarding the overall performance of the ongoing MBA courses. Most of the rows and columns in the sheet were highlighted in red or amber. There were delays in course launches, student support sessions were not held on time, and queries from prospective students weren't being responded to. Rajeev asked each team's head to present their respective cases and the reason for delays and other issues. One by one, each team lead stood up, spoke of the challenges they faced on the ground, spoke of how they were working on a revolutionary idea to turn things around, and how they needed Rajeev's cooperation and understanding. When Sonali asked about the delay of a specific course whose row was marked in red for three weeks consecutively, Guru, head of the Content team, told her that the content developer, Hansa, had gone on a week-long vacation. She was expected to be back the next week, post which she would launch the course. Upon close questioning, Sonali also found that the previous three student-support sessions could not be held as the student-support team had mixed up the student data. As a result, the invites and notifications for these sessions were sent to the wrong set of students.
Throughout the meeting, Sonali couldn't help noticing that none of the team leads missed adding how lucky they were to have a leader like Rajeev who trusted them and let them try out their innovative ideas. Rajeev thanked them profusely for their dedication and hard work. He added that now that Sonali was here, he hoped he would get some more time to focus on strategising how to grow EdtoWork to 5x of its current revenue in the next five years. He also added that it was now Sonali's job to turn the scoresheet completely in 'green'. The meeting was over, and everyone walked out with happy, cheerful faces.
Rajeev asked Sonali to stay back. "So, what do you think of your team?" Before Sonali could respond, he continued, "You must have noticed how well-bonded the team is! These are all bright, young people trying to do great work. I know they are not quite getting the results - and that is why the top leadership has brought you in. We want you to motivate this team further and help them reach the projected outcomes. That will give me some time to spend on my thought-leadership papers. But don't you ruffle them a lot. After all, we don't want to spend the next three months hiring new team members and training them, do we? Who has that kind of time?"
With that, he smiled brightly and walked out of the room.
Project Objectives
Analyse the key factors responsible for the team's poor performance.
Recommend the best strategies to overcome the business crisis.
Critique the role of Rajeev as a leader to foster business as well as team growth.

Questions: In the next segment, you will be introduced to the assessment questions of this project.

Q2. How would you describe Rajeev's leadership style? Do you think he is an inspirational leader or a collaborative one? What do you think are the top three reasons behind the team's poor performance?

Q3. Keeping in mind Rajeev's leadership style, if Sonali were to turn things around and drive up the performance of the Advantage team, what leadership style should she adopt? Give reasons for your answer.