Erik Peterson Case

Determine the Intervention (Erik Peterson)

Within the Erik Peterson Case, there were quite a few leadership and management challenges that needed to be addressed and overcome to guarantee the Green Mountain Cellular Telephone Company would be stood up and operational within the required timeframe. The laundry list of challenges include; not having the right person based on qualification and experience for the job, no formalized organizational structure and delineation of associated responsibilities, but most importantly no support from senior leadership and his confidence in his workers. In this situation, the major challenges in my opinion actually come from the leadership above Erik Peterson not supporting him and his lack of confidence in those that work for him to solve problems and resolve conflict.

In many instances Erik Peterson identified areas that he felt needed to be addressed such as reassigning Curt Andrews to duties other than project management, which was a critical position necessary to achieve the goal of establishing the network. This decision to allow Mr. Andrews to remain as the overall project lead was overruled by leadership above Erik Peterson. There were many other instances where senior leadership did not support the initiatives and efforts of Erik Peterson to include; frequency reuse, agreements made with local government which would have been beneficial in the long term and his desire to change subcontractors. All decision that should have been made at his level, but he wasn’t empowered to make the final decisions regarding those issues. The reluctance to allow Erik Peterson to make these key decisions at his level is also very confusing primarily because he was brought into this position with the understanding this project had already experienced problems and strong leadership and direction was needed to move it forward.

The actions needed to respond to these challenges are two-fold; engage senior leadership to get their...