"Examine competency development and career management for a long-term solution to the problem." Dhruv Prakash, Practice Leader (People Value Management), Hewitt Associates

For the moment, Sood does not have much choice but to take charge of the deal and salvage the transaction as well as the company's image.

However, to solve the problem of his high performers constantly creating scenes for him to deal with, he has some work to do. Work that would involve a serious look at a wide range of issues from organisation structure to performance definition to management of high posts and high performers.

Although internal competition may appear to be due to personality issues, it has a lot to do with the organisational context in which the players are made to perform. In this case, Power Equipment seems to have adopted a product/customer matrix structure. However, the roles do not seem to have been defined.

In the absence of such clarity, both Mathur and Kumar will see each customer as an opportunity to pursue their own agenda, one for product sale and the other to try and expand the order potential even if it means competing with each other. The customer, on the other hand, will see their company as a disorganised supplier and become closed to system solutions that Power Equipment may be able to provide for their mutual benefit.

In my opinion, Sood, as soon as he has dealt with this deal, has to get on with the following:

• Examine the structure and clarify the role definitions. If in doing so he realises that one of the two jobs may not be large enough for either of them, he should transfer one of them. It may be inconvenient so soon after the recent changes, but is necessary.

• Call both of them individually for a chat, where he should go over the performance expectation using the latest incident and explore how the tensions between the two may be defused. It may be a good idea to involve them in the above exercise of role clarification and structure development.

• Examine the performance management, competency development and career management of high performers to ensure a long-term solution to this problem.

"Both executives should demonstrate to Sood and their teams the values of teamwork and mutual respect." Himanshu Jani, Director (HR), Asia-Pacific Agilent Technologies

First things first, and that's customer. Pranav Sood needs to have a retrieval strategy to regain the confidence of Beta CEO, Ranjan Bhat to clinch Power Equipment's credibility as a trusted, reliable preferred supplier. He needs to immediately connect with Beta, apologise about the confusion, and let him know that he is personally looking into the matter to provide Beta with the best solution. Then, Sood needs to call both Kumar and Mathur and let them know, in no uncertain terms, that it's a situation of customer first, the interest of Power Equipment second, and their personal glory the last. That this situation is not only personally embarrassing for him, but damaging to the company's reputation and business. Fortunately for Sood, he may have been saved a complete credibility loss, as the base of both the quotations was the same (costing source).

Since Kumar's quotation was more from a total systems solutions perspective, and therefore higher at Rs 5 crore, it would strategically make sense for Sood to depute Kumar to represent the Power Equipment bid and then strip costs depending on the customer's needs. However, the caveat would be that if they won the deal then there would be quota-sharing for the purposes of both Kumar's and Mathur's sales targets. This would substantiate the emphasis and need for collaborative teamwork, and putting up one face to the customer.

From a more long-term perspective, the organisation structure and systemic issues of overlap between switchgears sales and institutional sales would need to be addressed.

Increasingly, many companies structure their sales and marketing functions such that there is product-line focus and institutional focus. The underlying premise of such structures is better service and solutions for customers, and order maximisation. In the case of Power Equipment, the systems, processes, communication methodology, quota credit-sharing, collaborative teaming and one face to the customer are issues that possibly have not been addressed up front. This could have led to the resultant ambiguity and crisis. These critical areas need to be unequivocally recognised, clarified and agreed to by both the general managers and signed off.

Sood, as the CEO, would need to articulate this and ask Mathur and Kumar to resolve these issues mutually and submit a blueprint of their operating principles. And to gauge the effectiveness of the implementation of the operating principles document, key performance objectives for Mathur and Kumar should be clearly defined and periodically reviewed.

Sood would also need to tell them explicitly that while he values both of them as high performers, business embarrassments, as in the Beta case, are unacceptable. Sood needs to communicate that he expects them to get their act together and demonstrate visibly to him and their teams the fundamental values of teamwork, and mutual respect.

Since the intrinsic personal chemistry between these two star executives appears to have been vitiated for some time, it may be prudent for Sood to either get a highly-skilled internal organisation development consultant to work on the systemic and team collaborative issues or invest in hiring an appropriate external consultant to work with them. The consequences of such resolution would benefit even the respective teams of the two general managers.

Reward and recognition programmes for inter-group teamwork and objective achievements across boundaries would actively promote this and also compel the leaders to walk the talk. A personal development objective for Mathur and Kumar would be to become champions of organisation team work and showcase, in top management meetings, the best practices of collaborative teaming. They could also attend seminars on the subject to augment their leadership sensitivity.

In today's war for talent, Sood would surely recognise that retaining and motivating top talent needs CEO sponsorship, prioritisation, and immediate resolution.

"Sood should make Kumar and Mathur negotiate expectations so that they stay committed to what they have agreed upon" Dr Shakuntala David, Management trainer and consultant

Sood's priority should be to sort out the "confusion" at Beta Auto. His next step should be to resolve the conflicts that Nitin Kumar and Rakesh Mathur seem to keep having. To find out the reasons for the conflicts, Sood should talk to them separately. He should spell out clearly the negative impact their behaviour is having on the environment of the organisation and customer relationship.

I would imagine that these high-performers are inherently competitive, so some amount of rivalry between them is understandable and, indeed, desirable. I also see a larger organisational issue that CEO Sood has to deal with-the organisational structure. In its current form, it offers a lot of scope for conflict.

When Sood sits down with the two star performers, he's likely to discover that the core issues are a feeling of hurt and a lack of clarity in roles. Mathur, as the General Manager for switchgears, is often on a collision course with Kumar, whose responsibility as an institutional marketer is to maximise revenues via customer "solutions".

Most of Power Equipment's current problems would be solved once the two executives are able to address their personality issues and their roles are clarified. Ergo, Sood should help the two air their grievances, sort out differences, and then identify their exact roles.

His next step should be to make them negotiate expectations from each other, so that they stay committed to what they have agreed upon. Finally, a periodic review of the changes in structure and roles needs to be done. Sood is fortunate to have two hyper-competitive executives working for him. Instead of losing them to conflicts, he should help them resolve their differences for performance enhancement and growth.