Treadway Case

Segment 3: Understanding the Treadway Case

Brenda Wilson

Change is never simple, but major change, if handled incorrectly, can be devastating to an organization. Major organizational change can mean downsizing, layoffs, people replacement, or it can mean growth, innovation, and skill development. The ability to manage change, while continuing to meet the needs of the organization, is a very important skill required by today's leaders and managers. Successful organizational change can be quite difficult to accomplish. To get an understanding of an organizational change and begin guiding successful change effort, the leadership or management of the organization should have at least a broad understanding of the context of change effort. The newly-transferred Director of Human Resources, Ashley Wall, has been asked to address one of the main problem of the Lima plant, which is the high employee turnover of the line foremen position, this is due to: no training, no authority, but a lot of responsibility, and no career growth.

One main problem due to turnover of line foremen was no training. According to the case, new line foremen received only informal training, at the discretion of the general supervisor and area manager. With sufficient amount of training, employees can get a head start during any task on the job rather than having to learn through years of experience and/or through trial and error. Continually moving on through any task that you should have received training on can be very frustrating and lead to a high turnover rate. Robert Henry, the Personnel Manager at Treadway, has observed employees in action and sees that the new line foremen are thrown into the job with little training. He suggests that the company needs to provide more training. He also echoed, regarding the line foremen, “The general supervisors expect them to just sink or swim. They don’t know how to manage a dispute, and they know less about their legal rights...