Addressing the Challenges of Groups and Teams
Introduction
Effective communication of leaders, supervisors and managers with his or her reports is essential to the productivity and success of any organization. In the case of Enron, the lack of communicates with the leaders, who in turn did not communicate well with his or her managers within the organization was partial cause for Enron’s demise. When the communication chain broke down, Enron’s productivity suffered, hurting the manager’s ability to communicate effectively with the employees, stakeholder and the public.
Although a variety of explanations are available for the collapse of Enron, this training plan will make use of principles of communication-based leader responsibilities to explain Enron's demise. This paper will show how if this training plan had been applied to the communication, collaboration and conflict management practices within Enron the organization could still be one of if not the top corporations in the world trading gas, electricity and water.
The Communication Issue
Effective communication is the key to planning, leading, organizing, and controlling the resources of any organization. Enron show no dominant communication strategy in the company. Enron professed openness but engaged in blame shifting. If a person looks at the top management of Enron it looks like they were hiding his or her ideas and risks from each other without noticing that the company was on a downward path. The combined message strategy suggests cooperation between legal and public relations counsel, but none was there. “These findings suggest additional evidence that legal and public relations crisis communication strategies are starting to blur.” (Miller, Yin, Volz, Ioerger, & Yen, n.d.) This training plan suggest communicating appropriate values to create a moral climate, and maintaining adequate communication to be informed of organizational operations, while maintaining openness to signs of problems. A...