1
Chapter 1
Eliza’s Bad Monday
at HDS Tech
Eliza sat alone in her ofce with the door tightly shut—
a rarity for her. She was a strong proponent of being
an accessible and approachable president and CEO, but
on this Monday morning she needed a little quiet time
to think. She didn’t have a great weekend; instead of
enjoying her time with her daughters and husband, she
was preoccupied by work concerns. Normally, Eliza
was able to separate home from work. When she was
home with the kids, she always made an effort to be
fully present for them. She set up a place on her desk
in her home ofce where she would regularly deposit
her smartphone and her laptop so that she wouldn’t be
tempted to check and recheck e-mails or return phone
calls during family time. She was good at setting up
boundaries and systems in order to manage her time
2 ◾ Transforming Teams
effectively. But today, time management wasn’t her
problem. Nor, for that matter, were her work troubles
on her phone or laptop. Her troubles were back at
work, and she couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Her production team at work seemed suddenly
overwhelmed, and this wasn’t even their busy period,
as crunch time was still a couple of months away.
They had experienced some turnover in staff that Eliza
was concerned about, and she had detected from exit
interviews some serious potential issues with morale
and employee engagement. But worst of all, the ght-
ing between her VP of client services and her VP of
sales was moving beyond bickering: it was becoming
toxic and personal.
Claire, her VP of client services, and Dave, her VP
of sales, had never been close. They often worked at
cross purposes, which Eliza knew was typical with
outside sales and internal operational functions. In
fact, she had seen it in all of her previous jobs. But
recently, their disagreements seemed to have become
more vicious, more scathing. Eliza was also observing
that, for the rst time, this animosity was spilling over
into the lower levels of the sales and customer service
functions. She had actually overheard two of the sales
reps complain, “Just you wait until customer service
gets a hold of that new big KarBan order. Guaranteed
their response will be: ‘No, that can’t be done’ or ‘more
work that we don’t have time for.’” And in a recent staff
meeting that Eliza had held with her senior manage-
ment team, Claire had described the salesforce as “out-
of-control mavericks.”
Eliza’s Bad Monday at HDS Tech ◾ 3
For the rst time in her four years as head of the
company, Eliza dreaded going to work on Monday
morning. And it didn’t take long for her to realize the
dread was more than justied. Having been in the
ofce for just three hours, she had already mediated
two arguments, learned of another resignation, and dis-
covered that a signicant sales order was in jeopardy.
Without a doubt, things were worse today than at any
other point since she had joined the company.
But the biggest concern for Eliza was that she was
having difculty pinpointing why and how things had
gone so awry.
This shouldn’t be happening, she thought. By all
accounts, HDS Tech was a highly successful company.
Its capital investments in technology, manufacturing,
and R&D helped it gain substantial market share and
increased sales, gross prot, and EBITDA.
*
The board
of directors was more than happy. The company was
meeting all of its numbers and was ahead of all of its
competitors. And, for the rst time in a couple of years,
year-end bonuses promised to be substantial.
Eliza and her team had worked hard to bring the
company to this point. Yet now that they were on the
brink of revolutionary growth for the company, things
were beginning to fall apart. Sure, she anticipated that
there would be some production challenges in order to
meet increasing demand, and indeed production was
tight. But that’s not where her worries seemed to stem
from. Rather, they were coming from the sales and
*
EBITDA: Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.
4 ◾ Transforming Teams
customer service divisions and were beginning to have
a dangerously debilitating impact on the company.
Frustrating Eliza even more was the fact that she
had little time to worry about interpersonal bickering
or having to referee petty battles among her senior
management staff. Her plate was already full. She was
busy preparing her testimony on behalf of the indus-
try before the state telecommunications committee
on the topic of cybersecurity, which was two weeks
away. She was still knee-deep in negotiations with the
bank to try to secure a bridge loan to cover some of
the current product expansion, which needed to be
done by the end of the month. She was working on a
large Department of Defense proposal that the board
of directors was pushing her to pursue. And she was a
mom with two little kids. She was busy and didn’t have
time for these current troubles.
* * *
Eliza’s bad day started at her regularly scheduled
Monday morning staff meeting with her senior manage-
ment team, usually comprised of Claire, Kirby, the VP
of manufacturing, and Dave. This morning, Dave was
running late, as usual.
Claire arrived with a long list of concerns: delivery
dates were off by more than a week, customer com-
plaints were up by 20 percent, and close time for open
customer tickets had increased to more than four days.
But the worst bit of news that she offered was that a
major new client that HDS Tech had brought on board
Eliza’s Bad Monday at HDS Tech ◾ 5
last quarter, Cynsis Technologies, had threatened to pull
their account because of what they were saying was a
“gross misrepresentation” of HDS Tech’s capabilities.
“What do they mean by that, Claire? What ‘gross
misrepresentation’ are they talking about?” asked Eliza.
“They said that Dave told them our newest module
package would integrate with their internal operat-
ing system, but it doesn’t. They loaded it on Thursday
and it didn’t work. The customer called me on Friday
telling me that Dave had sold them a bunch of gar-
bage. This is embarrassing, Eliza. Dave sold them
more than 300 custom modules to be installed, but
we can’t even get the rst demo module to work at
their headquarters!”
“Kirby, what do you know about this?” asked Eliza,
clearly alarmed.
“We’re almost done manufacturing the modules. It’s
a big, custom run. We had to build it to their specica-
tions. I have no idea why it doesn’t run, but I do know
that if they pull it, we won’t be able to resell it because
it’s a complete custom job,” said Kirby. “We’ll be up the
creek for sure.”
Virtually all of the company’s modular products are
custom run, which Eliza knew made them both expen-
sive and a high risk for error.
Claire went on, adding to the sense of drama. “Eliza,
that mistake will cost us more than $660,000 on this
one product alone, not to mention what it will do to
our reputation! Lord knows what Dave was thinking in
selling this to Cynsis, but I don’t think he’s going to be
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