After studying this chapter, what would you recommend to improve Leon’s management style and, ultimately, the work environment and performance?

Leon was recently promoted as the regional director for a large public health system. He was a conscientious and hard worker. His reputation as an excellent leader centered on his ability to understand in detail what was going on in his department and, after a series of earlier promotions, his agency. Now he oversaw multiple agencies across an expansive geographic area.
His philosophy could be expressed as, “Whatever one measures, improves.” In this spirit, he designed a monthly report for all the managers to complete. The report took each manager about ten hours to finish and often reached 30 pages. He then held monthly conference calls during which he asked specific questions regarding the data. If managers were unable to answer his questions, they were frequently invited to “personal meetings.”
These meetings were rumored to often get tense, because Leon liked to “go for the jugular” and delve directly into the problem areas, at least as he perceived them.
After about six months, Leon had instilled a mixture of awe and fear in his managers. No one wanted to be called into his personal meetings.
Leon had little authority to directly fire his managers, but he did reassign two of them to areas of lesser responsibility. The others wondered when they would be next. However, the managers’ data collection and their readiness to answer even the most trivial questions had improved dramatically.