Wolfgang Keller Hbr

Wolfgang Keller, Manager Director of Konigsbrau subsidiary, had experienced different work relationship conflicts with his subordinate, Dimitri Brodsky, who is the Commercial Director in the same subsidiary. The problem seems to be in the different managerial styles. While Keller is more action style, an extrovert leader, likes to be involved in daily operation, personally supervises and deal with important issues, Brodsky is methodical and analytical, he usually relies in delegating more operations to his subordinates. Keller argue that Brodsky does not have sufficient leadership to take care in critical actions of the company, and Brodsky defend himself saying that Keller is too obtrusive in his job.  

After year-end appraisal evaluation, Keller is trying to decide how to proceed with Brodsky´s situation. In my personal opinion, Keller should keep working with Brodsky. Both should learn how to work together in personality matters, as well as leadership issues and take advantage of both managerial styles, that combined will offer more benefit to the company.

Otherwise, not always a leader should be sit backwards just analyzing information as Brodsky continuously acts. If you are in a manager position you have to have, or at least develop, leadership skills. Very often a manger has to make fast actions and decisions when an important situation, that could affect directly the results of the company, comes. Keller showed how Brodsky was inefficient in the examples of the annual distributors meeting, and in a distributor´s lawsuit with bad debts.

I would like to suggest that the company enhance its Human Resource strategies by two important factors. First, develop a managerial training program in where the company combines the Ukrainian and German culture, along with the diverse manager styles, focusing in management skills related with the strategic of the company, that in this case, is the commercial strategy with distributors. Second, implement a continuous performance management evaluation, establishing standards and goals. In this way, the company can obtain accurate data about the performance of every manager in numeric results and leadership skills.