DDBA 8151 Week 8 Leadership Consulting Report Example

Restoring the Yards' Credit Decisions: A Consulting Report for the Vice President of Operations on Why Contractor Credit Exceptions Moved to the Region in 2025, What Explains It and What to Pilot

Student Name

Walden University

DDBA 8151: Organizational Leadership

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Restoring the Yards' Credit Decisions: A Consulting Report for the Vice President of Operations on Why Contractor Credit Exceptions Moved to the Region in 2025, What Explains It and What to Pilot

Executive Summary

In August, the problem was described as yard managers who had "stopped acting like owners." This report tested that description against company records and ten interviews. The evidence supports a different reading. Since April 2025, managers at our twelve yards have sent about three of every four contractor credit exceptions to the regional credit office, where before they decided about four in five themselves. Credit answers that used to arrive the same day now take four business days at the median, contractors have moved some orders to a competitor and two outside sales representatives cite lost accounts. But the change is limited to credit decisions and began in a single month. It follows two events: a restructuring that left managers' approval limits unclear, and a regional meeting at which one yard's audited bad debts were reviewed in front of peers. The report recommends a six-month pilot at four yards that reissues credit authority in writing and moves loss reviews into private conversations, with four matched yards for comparison and a rule for stopping. The decision requested is approval to begin the pilot in January.

The Presenting Problem and Why It Needed Testing

The phrase "stopped acting like owners" describes an attitude and implies a remedy, coaching or replacement. Schein (1999) cautions that the problem as first described is often not the one that needs solving. The phrase was tested here because it predicts a broad, gradual change in how managers behave, and that prediction can be checked.

The Evidence Base

Table 1

Sources Behind the Findings

Detailed findings in the records review and interview synthesis, available on request.

What Changed and When

The exception log shows a sharp, dated shift: yard-level decisions fell from roughly 80 percent of exceptions to roughly 25 percent in April 2025 and stayed there. Approvals for staffing, deliveries and inventory, recorded in the same system, did not change. If managers had truly stopped caring, those decisions would have shifted too.

How Each Level Explains It

All four yard managers interviewed said they no longer know their credit limit, and all four named the April meeting as the point at which they stopped approving exceptions. Regional staff were divided: two directors gave different accounts of the current limit, and both described the April meeting as a routine review. The executive view, as stated in August, was that limits were unchanged and that the managers' approach had changed. Each level is describing the same shift accurately from where it sits; the gap between them is part of the problem.

The Diagnosis and the Rival It Defeated

The managers pulled back from credit decisions for two reasons: their authority grew ambiguous, and approving an exception came to look personally risky once a loss had been discussed publicly. The regional credit office made it easy to send decisions elsewhere. The rival reading, lost ownership, does not explain why only credit decisions changed, or why the change came in one month. A cause map joining records and interviews showed both causes supported by two kinds of evidence and the rival contradicted by the unchanged decisions. Yin (2018) recommends that case explanations be judged by how well they withstand rival explanations; this one withstood the rival management first proposed, though the report cannot say how much weight each of the two causes carries.

Why Kanter's Account of Power Explains It

Three theories were compared. Kanter (1977) traced cautious managers who pass decisions upward to positions cut off from information and backing, not to weak character, and that account fits every element of the diagnosis: the unclear limit cut access to information, and the public review signaled that support would be withdrawn after a loss. Edmondson (1999) on psychological safety explains the meeting's effect and informs the review process. A confidence or self-efficacy explanation fits poorly, since managers remain confident in other decisions and the change was too sudden for a shift in belief about ability.

The Pilot

For six months, four yards will receive written confirmation of their $25,000 credit authority and a private loss review process that tells missing paperwork apart from honest misjudgments. A matched set of four yards keeps current practice. Yard 3, named in the April meeting, is excluded to avoid singling it out again. Measures, compiled monthly, are the share of exceptions decided at yard level, decision time, bad debt on exceptions and contractor order retention. It ends early if, three months in, fewer than half of exceptions are being decided locally, or if losses on locally approved exceptions run at more than 1.5 times the comparison yards' rate for a quarter. Its cost is mainly time: about 20 hours of the regional credit manager's time for reviews and a few hours of the vice president's for letters and calls.

What I Could Not See

This report has limits. I work in one region and had readier access to its yards; two of the four managers interviewed report to my own regional director. Coghlan and Brannick (2014) note that insiders gain access and context but can mistake familiar views for general ones. I did not have access to individual managers' bonus calculations, which tie part of their pay to bad-debt levels and may add to the perceived personal risk. The exception log recorded yard-level approvals only from January 2025, so the earlier baseline rests on three months. And I cannot separate the two causes; the pilot changes both at once, so it will show whether the diagnosis as a whole is right, not which cause matters more.

Decision Requested

Approve the pilot as described, beginning in January, with a review meeting in July. If the pilot succeeds, the next decision will be whether to reissue authority and adopt private loss reviews at all twelve yards.

References

Coghlan, D., & Brannick, T. (2014). Doing action research in your own organization (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Kanter, R. M. (1977). Men and women of the corporation. Basic Books.

Schein, E. H. (1999). Process consultation revisited: Building the helping relationship. Addison-Wesley.

Yin, R. K. (2018). Case study research and applications: Design and methods (6th ed.). SAGE Publications.