The case of ELITE (ELIminate The Errors) team created in the Democrat newspaper consisted of rises and falls. Initially, the performance of the team focusing on the improvement of customers’ satisfaction was rather low. However, the following measures and stages in the team development process led to the outstanding performance of the ELITE team. This paper will discuss the main stages of the development of the ELITE team and explain the main predictive factors of its success.
The main stages of development of the ELITE team were forming, storming, norming, and performing. Forming was the first stage of the development of the ELITE team. After Fred Mott as the general manager of the Democrat realized the importance of satisfying customers’ needs for increasing the profitability of the newspaper, he created a management group and organized Monday meetings.
The main goal of these meetings was an analysis of the main weaknesses and strengths and finding ways to improve. However, no improvements were noticed a year after the formation of this group, because nobody took the responsibility. The customer surveys revealed that the levels of customers’ satisfaction with the quality of services remained low. The storming stage started after the incident with the rat running across the page. After this case, it became clear that the team’s work was ineffective because nobody was responsible for the accuracy of the ads. Then, a special department focusing on the elimination of errors was created.
However, the storming stage continued because there were a lot of disputes at the meetings of the groups, and some of the participants were even moved to tears. These discussions appeared to be rather effective and allowed the team to proceed to the following stage of norming, at which the members of the team adapted to one another and understood their target and what was necessary for meeting it. The next stage of the team development process, performing, was the most successful one.
Although Mott’s initiative first appeared to be ineffective, the team finally reached high performance, which can be explained with effective organizational changes and reconsideration of the newspaper’s policies. Understanding the importance of customers’ satisfaction which led the top management to the idea of changing the corporate culture was an important trigger of further success.
The ‘customer obsession’ campaign was undeniably a great idea. However, poor performance at the forming stage resulted in its ineffectiveness. The discussions during the Monday meetings were ineffective and brought no results. This fact proves that the storming stage is a mandatory element of team development processes. The high performance of a team is impossible without the stage of storming and full-contact interaction between the members.
The main predictive factors leading to the newspaper’s success included the manager’s understanding of low levels of customers’ satisfaction as a weakness of the firm, readiness to organizational changes, development of a special team for eliminating the mistakes and the following effective interaction between the members of a team at the storming stage. All of these stages were essential to creating favorable conditions for the high performance of the ELITE team whose experience can be adopted by other organizations.
The case of the ELITE team demonstrates that all stages in the team development process are essential to achieving the high performance of the team. Understanding of the newspaper’s weaknesses and effective organizational changes were the main predictors of the Democrat’s success.