Case Study: Blakes Sports Apparel and Switch Activewear

Assignment 2: Case Study

Jack Welch Management Institute

JWI 510: Leadership in the 21st Century

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Introduction

The Primary aim of this report is to identify and determine what the internal problem is within the Executive management team of Blakes Sports Apparel and Switch Activewear. The company Blake Sports Apparel and Switch Activewear is a corporation that pays other branding corporations to obtain a license to make merchandise using their logo before they ship them off to sell to other customers and retail chains. Most of the team members that work for Blakes Sports Apparel have been there since the beginning, or at least close to the beginning, and many of them are very hard working, strong-willed, individuals but for some reason whenever it comes time to work as a team there seems to be far too much conflict. During this case study, I will be giving my analysis on the issues that this group of employees is dealing with and ways that can help them better cooperate as a team.

Risk to the business

Communication plays a significant role in everything. Great communication cuts down the risk of disaster is a corporation big time. Unfortunately, when working with big corporations and even bigger group settings, miscommunications are a lot more likely to happen, and that’s what happened with the Executive management team at Blake Sports Apparel and Switch Activewear. One of the significant miscommunication issues that are happening within the management time was misholdoing of information. The management team would hold information that dealt with ideas that could help improve the sales and inventory reports (Groyberg, Baden 2017). The fact that one team member would purposely withhold information from another team player just because one works with inventory and the other works with sales, and he felt offended just goes to show not only is miscommunication present but also there is no trust, and without those two components the team is doomed for failure.

Successes

The executive management group has just as many redeeming qualities as they do negative qualities. A few of these positive qualities that would best describe the Executive team members are that they’re passionate, entrepreneurial, knowledgeable, self-motivated, and very dedicated (Groysberg, Baden 2017). Personally speaking, I believe that the Executive management team as composed of the type of people that want to get the job done no matter wait. They’re very loyal to Blake Sports Apparel and knowledgeable. Those are the type of people that you want on your team. The executive members again showed how when they come together, anything is possible! With the help of the executive team members help Blake Sports Apparel secured financing from one of the global.

Analysis

At the beginning of Blake Sports Apparel, the executive team was basically leaderless and had to do and come up with different reporting mechanisms to make their departments more improved. An example of this was when the sales department planned and put products on the auto-replenishment status, but the quantities would sometimes not end up right, or the product did not have a good turn over rate, and the product would just sit in a warehouse consuming money (Groyberg, Baden 2017). Deadlines were continuously ignored which would cause the shipping of the customer’s merchandise to be missed.

Another way that communication was lacking was information sharing. This just goes to show how once again the communication was at an all-time low, and the executive wasn’t being team players. They were in fact hindering the team. Another piece of information I gathered from reading the report was that there were conflicting views on whether or not alignment affects the performance of the team. As a team, there has been a cause for friction within the group of executives because everyone’s goals don’t align together. There are different departments amongst the executives, and they each have their one separate agenda if you will, so of course, with that being said there’s going to be some conflict and it’s going to have a negative impact on the group. It can also cause trust issues amongst the group.

Conclusion

This report did, however, highlight a few of the redeeming qualities of the executive team and their loyalty to Blake Sports Apparel. This report also helped me think of ways that would help the executives be more of a team, such as being more open to communications and the ideas of the other teammates, having proper leadership that would help everyone stay on the same path towards the common goal of the company, and installing interdependence within the group. Yes, these are just a few tools that can help the executives, and I know they’re going to need more to help their future performance, but it’s a great start.

Sources:

Jack Welch. 2005. Winning

Sean Miller. Everything DiSC Workplace Results. 2018. http://blackboard.strayer.edu

Sean Miller. Everything tki Results 2018. http://blackboard.strayer.edu

Blake Sports Apparel and Switch Activewear: Bringing the Executive Team Together.

https://alertlogic-hb4e.hbsp.harvard.edu/lti/links/417048-PDF-ENG.