Angela Higgins was pleasantly surprised when she was selected for the company's task force

to lead the development of a new, high-end product line to complement the company's existing

mid-range offerings. Yet after a few short meetings, Angela was starting to wonder about her

project work team even though the team consisted of some of the top talent in the company.

She was sensing that no one was overly committed to finding innovative options, except for

Ryan. However, Angela felt Ryan had an ulterior motive and simply wanted the team to come

up with a good plan because, as he put it, "This could be my ticket to the top," and while he

pushed the team to be productive, he personally never had anything to offer. And then there

was Kim, who couldn't get past her negativity to even try to be creative, as she was convinced

that a high-end line was a bad business move and doomed to fail in this poor economy. Sarah

and Andrew were great to work with but they seemed to be stretched thin with their main job

duties and never able to devote the full time to any of the meetings. In the last meetings, Sarah

also informed the team that she would be in China for the next month working on her new

expansion line and would try to participate when she could, but feared she would be limited in

her contributions. And who knew about Chase; he only rarely raised his head from his smart

phone just long enough to mutter, "Sounds good to me." With all this talent they should be able

to put together a sound proposal, but with the way things had progressed so far, Angela was

starting to wonder how.

Questions

1. What is the situation Angela faces? What are the key issues affecting the team's work

progress?

2. How did this situation develop? What could have been done by her company to achieve a

better situation?

3. How would you feel if you were Angela? Recommend Angela what she should do now to

correct the situation.