9-410-020
NOVEMBER 01, 2009

TSEDAL NEELEY

Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, Inc. (B)
“I learned that as a manager, you will face crises. You are not a failure if they are created on your watch. How you deal with these crises, however, will define your success as a leader.” −Greg James Greg James returned from his trip exhausted but intent on making the changes necessary to help his team work together effectively. The process problems that had instigated the HS Holdings crisis were easily remedied: James unified the two support queues, collapsed the weekend and weekday protocol phone numbers into one, and made sure that customer contact information was updated and universally available. But he knew that creating team cohesion was going to be more difficult. If James had learned anything from the HS Holdings crisis, he needed to keep his team more engaged with their client work and the company as a whole, and to keep himself better apprised of how his team was functioning. Before James could begin to create the kind of team cohesion he sorely needed, upper management wanted him to hold people accountable for the myriad of mistakes that had caused the crisis in the first place. James decided to weather the heat from upper management alone. Not only did he not fire any of his team members, he took full responsibility for all of the mistakes that had occurred under his watch. James knew that mistakes are a fact of life in such complex organizations, and that his team need not be punished. Protecting his team members was not only a great boon to morale, but it fostered greater loyalty; team members began outdoing each other to perform better for James. In order to further foster team cohesion, James knew his team needed more interaction, with him and with each other. He instituted weekly meetings with his eight team managers, allowing them to