During a strategic planning process in early 2018, the chief executive officer of St. Joseph’s Health Care in London, Ontario, Canada encountered various challenges that tested her values-based leadership style and innovative approach to stakeholder engagement. She had not anticipated the skepticism from the senior management team that surfaced when she attempted to finalize the strategic plan for presentation to the board of directors. Although she faced resistance to the detailed wording of the proposed aims, she was opposed to diluting the language in the strategic plan. She found it important for all engaged stakeholders to see that their input had shaped the resulting plan. However, successful implementation of the strategic plan would depend on the support of her team members, who were accountable for its implementation. Overruling a management recommendation could potentially jeopardize the good working relationship she had established, but failing to deliver a plan to stakeholders that reflected their input posed a reputational risk for the organization. The chief executive officer had to decide how to move forward.
The co-founder of a geological consulting start-up was taking an unconventional approach to employee motivation by using non-salary enticements (e.g. retreats) as tools to drive employees' engagement with the company. The approach ran contrary to not only long-standing human resources practices but also to the preferences of the company's own employees. But that approach had only been tested in a small setting so far. Would it work as the company scaled up in size to become a larger organization?
A female expatriate manager working for a large multinational financial institution must contend with gender discrimination. She had been offered a promotion and the choice of two positions. When she made her decision and informed her boss, he told her that she could not have the job she chose because it would mean periodic travel into Saudi Arabia, which, he believed, would not be possible for a woman.