Leadership Transitions: The Watkins Collection (4 Items)

CHAPTER 6

Achieve Alignment

Hannah Jaffey, a respected human resource consultant, was

hired by a former client to be corporate vice president of human

resources. She joined a company suffering from such intense

conflict at the top that some senior executives were barely on

speaking terms. Hannah had been brought in to support the

CEO in making needed personnel changes and to rebuild the

executive team.

Hannah soon realized the organization’s structure and incen-

tives system were at the root of the problems. A year earlier, the

company, which had grown rapidly, had been reorganized into

business units, each focusing on a specific product line. How-

ever, several of the units’ customer bases overlapped, and the new

structure and incentives system ...