Case Situation:
Sambian Partners is an architecture and engineering firm which believes in promoting an environment where the firm’s designers, engineers and client account managers collaborate to deliver top notch designs. The CEO believes Sambian Partners offer a good environment for its people to work and treat people right. The case describes how Sambian is facing a situation where its top talent is quitting. The CEO is surprised by these departures and is working with the firm’s human resource head to get to the root cause of these departures. The management wants to fix the root cause to stop this exodus.
Key Players Helen Gasbarian is the CEO of Sambian that her father founded in 1975. She took on the reins of firms after her
Nobody on that team was close to retiring. Similar sentiment is echoed in the survey result about ‘deadwood in the project manager ranks’. This brings to light another key aspect of the workforce at Sambian. The company has put in efforts to attract young, talented employees but has not provided them visibility into how their careers can grow with the company leading us to key issue of talent management.
During Tom’s exit interview, Mary’s feeble attempts at trying to retain him come across as inadequate. Her attempts to lure him back with the idea of a possible promotion or questioning if the raise was insufficient, calls in question the existing feedback model in the firm. Have they tried to build communication models where employees have clear visibility into their performance results? During our class we have looked into motivation where it is essential to have ’Performance-Outcome’ belief which provides the instrumentality factor of motivation. Considering Tom was on CEO’s short list of top-performers it comes as a surprise that Mary is trying to find the root cause of Tom’s unhappiness in an exit interview. Has Mary and her team done the needful to open the feedback channels? What is the current model to air grievance beyond giving anonymous feedback during the annual surveys.
Helen, who is the CEO of the company, has done a good job of bringing the culture of innovation to the firm thus