An initial assessment was performed and feedback provided to the CEO. The business climate was growing worse, the engineers had serious personality conflicts with each other, distrust, finger pointing and blame were the everyday realities. The recommendation was counter to what the executives expected.

First, the CEO was surprised when we advised them to not spend the money on the team-building exercise for the divisive group of engineers. As a general rule, it is important to hear what employees’ concerns are and engineers are usually very smart and insightful into the people issues even if they are not very skillful at dealing with the conflicts. However, the executives were being over-accommodating, bending over backwards with an open door policy that the engineers misused. Whenever they didn’t get their way, they would run to the next open door amongst the executives until someone would take up their cause whether or not it made good business or organizational sense. We advised the entire executive staff to stop taking up the individual causes and have the employees speak to one key executive when they had a complaint.

In addition, we pointed out that although they hadn’t said they were going to leave, we predicted they were all going to leave in a few months. Therefore, it would be a waste of time, money, and attention cycles to invest in a team-building exercise. In fact, as predicted, they did all leave within 6 months. The CEO said it was good sound advice–not to throw good money after a bad situation and then requested that we do other work that contributed to the organization.