Kid Spectrum - When Key Employees Clash

When Key Employees Clash

Mathew Spark is trying to increase the profitability of his new venture, Kid Spectrum, an undervalued company. In order to accomplish this, he introduced some new protocols for filling the timesheets so they could get the insurer reimbursement. To help him build his business, he has Ellen Larson, the administrative director on one hand and Ronnie Emerson was director of clinical operations on the other. Though they are both passionate about their work and two of the greatest assets for the company, they are at loggerheads over each other’s working style. Even though they both have the same objective: developing the business, their ways of achieving this different. While Ellen thinks that at the end of the day profit is all that matters, Ronnie feels serving your clients is the best way to do so. Thus Mathew is facing an issue as two of his key assets, though extremely efficient in their respective work, are discordant. I feel that there were many reasons for this conflict.

Firstly, Mathew is trying to run a company remotely which is not an efficient way to lead the business when you are trying to introduce and implement new protocols in the process. This is because he did not clearly set a direction to achieve those goals. To do so, he could have come down to Florida to understand the business needs, learning from the mistakes the company did in the past, getting opinion from the key resources in every department of the organization and then articulate a solution to be implemented to achieve the vision together.

 Secondly, there is no alignment between the people.  As stated in the article What Leaders Really Do, a key feature of an organization is interdependence. As suggested in the article that this may pose as a challenge when changes are made in the organization, it is Mathew’s responsibility to align his people so that they are in agreement over each other’s opinion and working style. The most reason for this disagreement was lack of communication between Ellen and Ronnie. This alignment between the two could have been achieved by setting up an informal meeting and helping them realize the importance of each other’s work.