OML 6300 Module 3 Final Paper: Rebuilding a Sales Team After a Toxic Leader Example

From Survivors to a Team: Applying Hackman, Lipman-Blumen and Eagly and Carli to a Sales Region

Student Name

M.S. in Management in Organizational Leadership, Thomas Edison State University

OML-6300: Contemporary Issues in Leadership

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

From Survivors to a Team: Applying Hackman, Lipman-Blumen and Eagly and Carli to a Sales Region

The Setting

My region covers central and southern New Jersey and has ten people: eight sales reps, each with a territory of pharmacies, clinics and hospitals, and two account managers who handle the region's three hospital systems. Six of the ten worked under Grant, the vice president whose toxic leadership I analyzed in Module 1. Grant left eighteen months ago, but his habits remain. Reps guard their customer contacts, do not share leads that fall outside their territory and still flinch when results are discussed in a group. Last year three opportunities at multi-site clinic groups were lost because the reps covering different sites did not coordinate.

The course gave me three lenses for this setting. Hackman (2002) explains what makes a team effective. Lipman-Blumen (2005) and Padilla et al. (2007) explain how the team was damaged. Eagly and Carli (2007) explain dynamics that shape my own leadership and my team's. This paper applies all three.

Are We a Team?

Hackman (2002) argues that a work team must first be a real team: a bounded group of people who are interdependent in their work and stable in membership. By that standard, my region is a set of individuals with territories. Their pay depends almost entirely on individual sales, and nothing in their work requires them to rely on one another. The two account managers are a partial exception; they already coordinate with the reps who cover their hospital systems' outpatient sites, and they will anchor the account teams. The lost clinic opportunities show that the work does need interdependence, because customers increasingly buy across sites and territories, but the structure does not reflect it.

This is the first decision the plan makes: the region should be a real team for the customers who span territories, while reps keep individual responsibility for single-site accounts.

Hackman's Five Conditions

Hackman identifies five conditions that raise the odds of good team performance: being a real team, having compelling direction, an enabling structure, a supportive organizational context and expert coaching. Wageman et al. (2005) developed the Team Diagnostic Survey to measure these conditions and found that they predicted team effectiveness. I gave my team a short version of the survey's questions last month.

The pattern is clear. My individual coaching, the strength described in Module 2, cannot make up for a team that was never designed as one. Hackman argues that leaders spend too much effort on coaching and too little on the structural conditions, which matter more.

The Legacy of the Toxic Leader

The toxic triangle of Padilla et al. (2007) explains why the structural problems persist. Grant was the destructive leader; the reps were conformers who adapted to survive; the environment of individual rankings and public humiliation rewarded guarding one's own. Grant is gone, but the environment he built is partly intact: the company still ranks reps nationally every month, and the ranking is posted.

Lipman-Blumen (2005) observes that the damage from toxic leaders outlasts their tenure, because followers internalize the fear and habits the leader rewarded. My reps learned that sharing a lead could help a rival climb the ranking, and that admitting a struggling account invited humiliation. Those lessons do not disappear when the leader leaves.

Edmondson (1999) found that psychological safety, a team's common belief that raising a concern carries no penalty, supports the learning behaviors teams need: asking for help, admitting mistakes and seeking feedback. My team has little of it. In our last meeting, when I asked who needed help on a difficult hospital bid, no one spoke; afterward, two reps asked me privately.

Gender and My Own Leadership

Eagly and Carli's analysis also bears on the plan. My Module 2 paper described the double bind I face: criticized as too soft or too hard. Leading a team that learned under a forceful male leader adds a twist. Some reps read my collaborative style as weakness, and one senior rep has twice gone over my head to the vice president. Eagly et al. (2003) found that the transformational and contingent reward behaviors more common among women leaders are associated with effectiveness. The plan therefore builds on my style rather than changing it, but it also includes clear, firm structures, because structure is harder to dismiss as weakness than encouragement is. The senior rep's behavior also calls for a direct response. I will meet with him, describe the pattern without labeling his motives and ask him to bring disagreements to me first. Eagly and Carli note that women leaders often face resistance to their authority that men in the same role do not; naming that resistance calmly, rather than ignoring it, is part of claiming the role.

Lessons From the Course

The three modules converge on one idea: leadership is shaped by the conditions around it. Lipman-Blumen and Padilla show that toxic leaders depend on susceptible followers and conducive environments. Eagly and Carli show that women's paths depend on the obstacles organizations build or remove. Hackman shows that teams depend more on the conditions their leaders create than on the leaders' personal style. The plan applies that idea throughout: it changes conditions first and relies on my personal style second.

The Plan

The plan addresses each of Hackman's conditions, with the toxic legacy and psychological safety in mind.

1. Make the Region a Real Team for Shared Customers

I will create two account teams for the fourteen multi-site clinic groups in the region, each with four reps and an account manager. Each account team will own its clinic groups jointly, with a single plan per customer. Single-site accounts stay with individual reps. This creates real interdependence where the work requires it, without disrupting what works.

2. A Compelling Direction

Hackman argues that direction should be challenging, clear and consequential. I will propose to the team a shared goal: grow revenue from multi-site clinic groups by 20 percent in a year, a goal no rep can reach alone. I will explain why it matters: these customers are growing fastest, and we lost three last year by failing to coordinate.

3. An Enabling Structure

Structure includes team composition, the design of the work and norms of conduct. I will set two routines: a thirty-minute account team meeting every two weeks to review each multi-site customer, and a shared lead log in which any rep can post an opportunity outside his or her territory. I will ask the team to set its own norms in the first meeting, and I will propose two: we discuss accounts, not people, and anyone can ask for help without penalty.

4. A Supportive Context

The context includes rewards, information and training. I cannot change the national ranking, but I can change what I recognize. I will propose to the vice president that 20 percent of each rep's bonus depend on the account team's results, and I will stop forwarding the national ranking to the team. I will recognize shared wins publicly at every regional meeting.

5. Expert Coaching

Hackman distinguishes motivational coaching at the start of a task, consultative coaching at the midpoint and educational coaching at the end. Each account team will get a launch session, a review at the six-month mark and a session on lessons at year end. I will keep individual coaching, but add team coaching, which my team has never had.

Involving the Team

I will not impose the plan. Hackman notes that the leader's most important decisions concern the team's structure and direction, but teams are more committed to norms they set themselves. I will present the diagnosis and the account team design at a regional meeting, ask the team to choose which reps join which account team, and let the account teams write their own customer plans. The shared goal of 20 percent growth will be my proposal, but the team may change it if members can argue for a better one. Involving people in the design is also part of repairing the damage of the Grant years, when decisions arrived without explanation and questions were treated as disloyalty.

Building Psychological Safety

Edmondson's research suggests leaders build safety by framing work as learning, acknowledging their own fallibility and inviting participation. I will open each account team meeting by naming one thing I got wrong in the previous two weeks. I will respond to bad news with questions rather than judgment. And I will never discuss a struggling account in front of the whole region, as Grant did; struggling accounts will be discussed within the account team, with the goal of helping.

Safeguards Against a Future Toxic Leader

In the toxic triangle model (Padilla et al., 2007), destructive leadership needs a conducive environment. I want to leave my team less susceptible and its environment less conducive, so that no future leader, including me, could turn it against itself. Three safeguards follow from the course: the upward feedback survey the company adopted after Grant, which I will review with my team each year; team norms written by the team, which belong to them rather than to their manager; and a standing invitation to raise concerns about any leader, including me, with human resources without fear of retaliation, stated openly at the start of each year.

Measures

Timeline

The plan runs over one year. In the first month I will present the diagnosis and design the account teams with the reps. In the second month the account teams will launch with their first plans and the lead log will open, and the bonus proposal will go to the vice president for a decision before the next fiscal year. At six months, the account teams will hold their midpoint reviews and I will repeat the Team Diagnostic Survey questions. At twelve months, the lessons sessions and a full survey will tell me whether the region has become a team. I will share the measures above with the team every quarter, so members can see their own progress.

Risks

The plan carries risks. The senior rep who goes over my head may resist account teams, because his territory includes the largest clinic group. I will involve him in designing the account team for that customer, giving him a lead role that recognizes his relationships. The vice president may refuse the bonus change; if so, I will ask for a one-year pilot in my region only. And the team may revert under pressure at quarter end, when individual quotas loom; I will protect the biweekly meetings even in the last week of the quarter, since skipping them would signal that teamwork is optional.

Conclusion

This paper applies the course to the work I do every day. Hackman shows that my team's problems are mostly structural: the region is not a real team, has no shared direction and lacks routines and rewards for working together. Lipman-Blumen and the toxic triangle explain why those problems persist after the toxic leader left. Eagly and Carli explain why my own style is effective but contested, and why firm structures will help. The plan creates account teams where interdependence is real, sets a shared goal, builds routines and safety, shifts rewards, adds team coaching and installs safeguards so the team cannot easily be turned against itself again. If it works, my region will become what it has never been: a team.

References

Eagly, A. H., & Carli, L. L. (2007). Through the labyrinth: The truth about how women become leaders. Harvard Business School Press.

Eagly, A. H., Johannesen-Schmidt, M. C., & van Engen, M. L. (2003). Transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire leadership styles: A meta-analysis comparing women and men. Psychological Bulletin, 129(4), 569-591. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.4.569

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Hackman, J. R. (2002). Leading teams: Setting the stage for great performances. Harvard Business School Press.

Lipman-Blumen, J. (2005). The allure of toxic leaders: Why we follow destructive bosses and corrupt politicians, and how we can survive them. Oxford University Press.

Padilla, A., Hogan, R., & Kaiser, R. B. (2007). The toxic triangle: Destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments. Leadership Quarterly, 18(3), 176-194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2007.03.001

Wageman, R., Hackman, J. R., & Lehman, E. (2005). Team Diagnostic Survey: Development of an instrument. Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 41(4), 373-398. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886305281984