Bob Lazier was the CEO of his family's business that manufactured high quality components used primarily in laundry machines. Despite LI's strong overall financial standing, Lazier was worried about a plateau in sales over the past six months and wondered if it had been a hiring mistake to bring on Scott Hawthorne as VP of sales. To complicate matters, Hawthorne's supervisor—the newly-promoted SVP of sales and marketing—was potentially compounding the problem by taking a laissez-faire approach, and had himself been the subject of recent criticism. Unfortunately, Lazier's concerns did not end there. His VP of manufacturing, a 10-year company veteran, had engendered a lot of animosity within the organization and his attitude just seemed to be getting worse. Lazier knew that it was time to make a decision on how to approach each of these performance issues.
