Minicase: Justin Marshall-A Failed Global Leadership Opportunity

Justin Marshall earned a bachelor's degree in business, with honors, from a prominent state university in the American Midwest. After graduation, he worked for two years in the finance department for a consumer products company and then two additional years in business development, consistently receiving excellent performance reviews from his superiors. He then returned to school to pursue a MBA degree at one of the top-ranked universities, ultimately graduating in the top 5 percent of his class. After being head hunted by several corporations, Justin accepted a lucrative offer to work for a prominent computer software and services company, which we will call Compcorp. Demonstrating stellar performance, Justin quickly worked his way up the corporate hierarchy. By the age of 31, he was promoted to a position as divisional vice president for the United States, where he oversaw the transformation of his division from one with mediocre performance to one of the most profitable divisions in Compcorp's global operations.

Justin's performance as division VP caught the eye of the company's senior executives, and he was offered the opportunity to become VP of one of Compcorp's international operations, a division serving the Asia-Pacific region. Although growing in overall sales, this division had underperformed its major competitors in recent years, and Compcorp's executives told Justin that they wanted to see if he could replicate his earlier success and transform the Asia-Pacific unit's performance.

Justin leaped at this opportunity. He had always dreamed of living and working abroad, and he exuded confidence that he could quickly diagnose the unit's problems and turn things around. Within a month, he had transitioned out of his former position, packed up his family, and moved into an apartment near the Hong Kong headquarters of his division. Applying the skills and experiences he had honed in his earlier positions, Justin began an aggressive evaluation of his new division. He pored over the financial statements and other documentation, met with dozens of key personnel throughout his division, and quickly initiated changes to help ratchet up performance. Rigorous reporting requirements and performance reviews were implemented, and Justin met with each of his country managers and other key personnel to agree on a set of ambitious cost-cutting and revenue growth targets. Individual unit performance was monitored closely and the results of each individual unit were shared across the unit's top managers. As Justin expected, performance showed a strong uptick during his second quarter as division VP. When he traveled back to headquarters for a quarterly review meeting with his superiors and the heads of other divisions, he proudly pointed out his unit's performance improvements and projected even stronger results for upcoming quarters. He basked in the positive feedback and attention he received from his bosses, as well as the substantial performance bonus he had earned. Justin felt that it was only a matter of time until he was promoted again, perhaps into a senior VP position back at headquarters.

During the months after he returned to Hong Kong, results for Justin's third quarter in office evidenced a slight decline, and he was also surprised to receive resignation letters from several key managers from his division. A few of these departing managers took comparable positions with Compcorp's competitors in the region, and rumors of morale problems began to filter back into the Hong Kong offices. Despite Justin's efforts to turn the situation around, the trend of personnel departures and performance declines continued into Justin's fourth quarter in office. A team from the American headquarters visited the region several times, meeting with Justin and a number of his executive team members and other subordinates, trying to discern what the problem was and how it should be resolved.

Justin realized that he needed to do something, and soon, to reverse the performance trend, or his position would be at risk.

Despite his efforts to initiate a number of rapid changes, performance did not improve. Shortly after his unit reported additional subpar performance for Justin's fifth quarter in office, he was invited back to company headquarters for a meeting with the company's president At that meeting, Justin was informed that he was being reassigned to a VP position in one of Compcorp's less prestigious domestic units and that a replacement executive was being appointed to lead the Asia-Pacific region.

Although termed a lateral transfer, Justin knew that his reassignment was viewed in the company as a demotion and that his once high-flying career path had encountered serious turbulence. Despite his efforts to focus on his new position and reestablish his visibility in the company, and to regain the career trajectory he had once had, Justin felt that his actions were not paying off. Within a year of his transfer, he left the company to pursue opportunities with a different organization.

Questions:

1. What might explain Justin's failure to perform well in his new leader tip role as the head of the Asia-Pacific division?

2. What might Compcorp have done to enhance prospects for Justin's successful performance? What might Justin himself have done to enhance the likelihood of success in his new assignment and to help avoid derailing an otherwise highly promising career in Compcorp?