Waltham’s is a leading retailer specialising in a high end clothing, food and home wear products.

Annabelle has been a Senior Manager at Waltham’s for four years and leads the Customer Services
Department of the company. In a recent appraisal, Annabelle undertook a 360-degree leadership survey
and scored above average in the competency ‘Inspires and Motivates Others to High Performance’. Her
report also indicated that her manager, peers, and direct reports saw this competency as critical for
someone in her position. Some of the written comments in her survey indicated that if she
demonstrated and applied this competency more often, it would have a significant positive impact on
her success on the job. For these reasons, she’s focusing her personal leadership development over the
next year on this competency.

Robin is a Customer Service Team Leader who reports directly to Annabelle. He has worked at
Waltham’s for nine years and his historical performance in sales has been excellent. He joined
Annabelle’s team twelve months ago from the home wear sales team. It is generally known among the
team however that Robin does not have as strong an ability to manage time and communicate decisions
effectively to enable his team to deal with customer queries and complaints. At the same time it is also
well known that he is reluctant to put in any extra hours needed to meet personal and team goals and
regularly emphasizes that he does not ‘live to work’.

Unfortunately, Robin has had several performance setbacks on the job over the last three months. One
of them revolved around some critical missed deadlines, which resulted in unresolved customer
complaints that had to be escalated to senior management level.
Annabelle had also assigned him two projects with some goals that were not easy for Robin to hit, but
she had issued those tasks specifically to give him development opportunities he had requested. This
approach was typical for her, as she generally has a positive, confident approach with her employees.
She worked together with him on his plans and checked in regularly with him during the weeks leading
up to the deadlines. Each time she was assured by him that everything was on track. These were very
visible failures that ended up impacting the performance of Robin’s entire team.

Other setbacks were related to workplace confrontations Robin has had with several of his team
members following the missed deadlines. Annabelle has met with Robin during the past few months,
moving quickly to pick him up on his missed responsibilities and inappropriate behaviour, to make clear
to him and the team that she was holding him accountable for his actions. She interviewed Robin’s team
to get their understanding of what happened and the impact these situations were having on the team.
She’s also spent a good deal of time with Robin to try and establish the reasons for his behaviour and to
help him get back on track. During her meetings with him, she sometimes downplayed the seriousness
of the situations in order to make him feel better about himself.
At Waltham’s, a single reward system is implemented whereby end of year bonuses are awarded to
employees based on annual performance ratings of teams. However, staff turnover is currently
increasing, particularly amongst Customer Service staff, and recent interviews conducted by Annabelle
have identified that Robin’s team feel that rewards based on team performance, rather than individual
performance, are unfair. Team members expressed their lack of enthusiasm for going above and beyond
for the organisation when their bonus was impacted by Robin’s missed deadlines.
Going forward, Annabelle planned regular meetings with Robin, where he expressed concerns about his
ability to lead and motivate others since his role change, which has caused him to withdraw from his
day-to-day responsibilities. Robin would much prefer to have a social life than a bonus and he can’t
understand why his team are so angry. Annabelle suggested she would put Robin forward for
management training to develop his skills and confidence. She also promised to feedback concerns
about the current reward system to the Senior Management team. Although Robin has accepted
Annabelle’s feedback and has shown willingness to take responsibility for his actions, he is feeling
demotivated by the tensions in his team and with Annabelle.
With reference to academic literature, critically discuss the problems within the case study and outline a
practical plan for how these could be resolved in relation to three of the following topics: