Chapter 9 3 the more focused it became on the challenge. elite decided to look carefully

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Only when one of them produced the famous “rat tracks fax” and told the story behind it did the group start to admit that

everyonenot everyone elsewas at fault.

Then, recalls one member, “We had some pretty hard discussions. And there were tears in those meetings.” The

emotional response galvanized the group to the task at hand and to one another. And the closer it got, the more focused it

became on the challenge. ELITE decided to look carefully at the entire process by which an ad was sold, created, printed, and

billed. When it did, the team discovered patterns in the errors, most of which could be attributed to time pressures, bad

communication, and poor attitude.

Commitment to one another drove ELITE to expand its aspirations continually. Having started with the charge to

eliminate errors, ELITE moved on to break down functional barriers, then to redesigning the entire advertising process, then

to refining new standards and measures for customer service, and, finally, to spreading its own brand of “customer

obsession” across the entire Democrat…. Inspired by ELITE, for example, one production crew started coming to work at 4 A.M.,

to ease time pressures later in the day….

To this day, the spirit of ELITE lives on at the Democrat. “There is no beginning and no end,” says Dunlap. “Every day we

experience something we learn from.” ELITE’s spirit made everyone a winnerthe customers, the employees, management,

and even Knight–Ridder’s corporate leaders. CEO Jim Batten was so impressed that he agreed to pay for managers from

other Knight–Ridder papers to visit the Democrat to learn from ELITE’s experience. And, of course, the 12 people who

committed themselves to one another and their paper had an impact and an experience none of them will ever forget.

88)

How do you explain the team’s reaching a high–performance condition? What were the major predictive

factors?

89)

Explain briefly the task–facilitating roles that can enhance team performance.

The Tallahassee Democrat‘s ELITE Team

Katzenbach and Smith (1993, pp. 67–72), as part of their extensive research on teams, observed the formation of a team at

the Tallahassee Democrat, the only major newspaper left in Tallahassee, Florida. Here is their description of how the team,

which called itself “ELITE Team,” performed over time. All incidents and names are factual. As you read the description, look

for evidence of team development stages.

Fred Mott, general manager of the Democrat, recognized [the declining profitability and distribution of most major

metropolitan newspapers] earlier than many of his counterparts. In part, Mott took his lead from Jim Batten, who made

“customer obsession” the central theme of his corporate renewal effort shortly after he became Knight–Ridder’s CEO. But the

local marketplace also shaped Mott’s thinking. The Democrat was Tallahassee‘s only newspaper and made money in spite of

its customer service record. Mott believed, however, that further growth could never happen unless the paper learned to

serve customers in ways “far superior to anything else in the marketplace.” The ELITE Team story actually began with the

formation of another team made up of Mott and his direct reports. The management group knew they could not hope to

build a “customer obsession” across the mile–high barriers isolating production from circulation from advertising without

first changing themselves. It had become all too common, they admitted, for them to engage in “power struggles and finger

pointing.”

Using regularly scheduled Monday morning meetings, Mott’s group began to “get to know each other’s strengths and

weaknesses, bare their souls, and build a level of trust.” Most important, they did so by focusing on real work they could do

together. For example, early on they agreed to create a budget for the paper as a team instead of singly as function heads.

Over time, the change in behavior at the top began to be noticed. One of the women who later joined the ELITE Team, for

example, observed that the sight of senior management holding their “Monday morning come–to–Jesus” meetings really

made a difference to her and others. “I saw all this going on and I thought, ‘What are they so happy about?”‘

Eventually, as the team at the top got stronger and more confident, they forged a higher aspiration: to build customer

focus and break down the barriers across the broad base of the paper....

A year after setting up the new [team], however, Mott was both frustrated and impatient. Neither the Advertising

Customer Service department, a series of customer surveys, additional resources thrown against the problem in the interim,

nor any number of top management exhortations had made any difference. Ad errors persisted, and sales reps still

complained of insufficient time with customers. In fact, the new unit had turned into another organizational barrier.

Customer surveys showed that too many advertisers still found the Democrat unresponsive to their needs and too

concerned with internal procedures and deadlines. People at the paper also had evidence beyond surveys. In one instance,

for example, a sloppily prepared ad arrived through a fax machine looking like a “rat had run across the page.” Yet the ad

passed through the hands of seven employees and probably would have found its way into print if it had not been literally

unreadable! As someone commented, “It was not anyone’s job to make sure it was right. If they felt it was simply their job to

type or paste it up, they just passed it along.” This particular fax, affectionately known as the “rat tracks fax,” came to

symbolize the essential challenge at the Democrat….

At the time, Mott was reading about Motorola’s quality programs and the goal of zero defects. He decided to heed

Dunlap’s advice by creating a special team of workers charged with eliminating all errors in advertisements. Mott now

admits he was skeptical that frontline people could become as cohesive a team as he and his direct reports. So he made

Dunlap, his trusted confidante, the leader of the team that took on the name ELITE for “ELIminate The Errors.”

A year later, Mott was a born–again believer in teams. Under ELITE’s leadership, advertising accuracy, never before

tracked at the paper, had risen sharply and stayed above 99 percent. Lost revenues from errors, previously as high as $10,000

a month, had dropped to near zero. Ad sales reps had complete confidence in the Advertising Customer Service department’s

capacity and desire to treat each ad as though the Democrat‘s existence were at stake. And surveys showed a huge positive

swing in advertiser satisfaction. Mott considered all of this nothing less than a minor miracle.

The impact of ELITE, however, went beyond numbers. It completely redesigned the process by which the Democrat sells,

creates, produces, and bills for advertisements. More important yet, it stimulated and nurtured the customer obsession and

cross–functional cooperation required to make the new process work. In effect, this team of mostly frontline workers

transformed an entire organization with respect to customer service.

ELITE had a lot going for it from the beginning. Mott gave the group a clear performance goal (eliminate errors) and a

strong mix of skills (12 of the best people from all parts of the paper). He committed himself to follow through by promising,

at the first meeting, that “whatever solution you come up with will be implemented.” In addition, Jim Batten’s customer

obsession movement helped energize the task force.

But it took more than a good sendoff and an overarching corporate theme to make ELITE into a high–performance team.

In this case, the personal commitments began to grow, unexpectedly, over the early months as the team grappled with its

challenge. At first, the group spent more time pointing fingers at one another than coming to grips with advertising errors.