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The local directors of a hi-tech aerospace organisation were being ignored by their reports and yet were not being supported by the layer above.

We soon found that the teams across the organisation had decided that their managers had lost touch with the rest of the organisation and that they were ignoring the views and feedback of the people designing and building the spacecraft and executing research projects.

The result was that projects were falling behind and an entire layer of leadership were ‘missing’ from the structure for many months – with all the attendant consequences for productivity and project tracking.

We helped this management team to understand not only the requirement to pay attention to their people but also how to actually communicate with them and to deal with their ideas as well as their reservations.

Over the period of a few months the 17 managers concerned regained contact with their teams in a more meaningful way to the point that when the company announced that it was to be acquired by their competitors the management team were in a position to be able to counsel and retain the talent which might have otherwise jumped ship.