Micromanager

George Latour considers himself a good leader. As CEO of Retronics, George has a mandate to grow revenues with an eye toward taking the software-engineering firm public by 2006. At the behest of the chairman of the board, he has hired a new marketing director, Shelley Stern--"a thoroughbred" who, the chairman insists, just needs a little training in the business. George does his best to bring his new hire up to speed. He has Shelley sit in on developers' meetings, has her accompany the sales force on client calls, and even has the CFO explain the company's cash flow situation to her. He also takes pains to help her correctly position marketing and press materials. But Shelley never seems to really take the bit. In fact, Shelley considers George's hands-on management style oppressive, and she's dreadfully unhappy. What George sees as efforts to bring her up to speed, like making her go on those sales calls when she has other work to do, she views as signs that he doesn't trust her judgment. What's more, Shelley is spread too thin. Yet when she asks for help--if not additional staff, at least an outside contractor--George asks for a list of everything she's working on and tells her he'll help her prioritize. In this fictional case, a he-said, she-said debate erupts over competing management styles. Four commentators--Jim Goodnight, the CEO of SAS Institute; Mark Goulston, a psychiatrist and the senior vice president at Sherwood Partners; J. Michael Lawrie, the CEO of Siebel Systems; and Craig Chappelow, the senior manager of assessment and development resources at the Center for Creative Leadership--offer their perspectives on the problem and how to solve it.