Democrat ELITE team
Executive summary
Democrat ELITE team has experienced a decline in profit margins in its newspaper distribution chain compared to many of the counterparts. The customer obsession theme was utilized by the team to shape Mott’s thinking. Thus, there was a need to utilize unique means of serving their customers than their competitors in the market. Hence, a new ELITE team was formed to try and build “customer obsession” despite the level barriers present between the production and circulation of their newspapers. However, the group resulted in blaming games which were characterized by power struggles. Eventually, Mott’s group resulted in organizing Monday meetings to help understand the stakeholder’s strengths and differences to help address their current market problems. The meetings were capable of focusing on real problems faced in the market, thus necessitated the development of counter initiatives to attain a long-lasting solution. For instance, the meetings helped create a budget and helped change from addressing issues a single function head. Over time, notable behavioural changes had been developed with meetings such as “Monday morning come-to-Jesus,” making a huge organizational change.
Consequently, the managerial team was able to grow stronger, with their confidence levels sharply rising. Thus, the ELITE group addressed key problems facing their operations in the markets through increased customer focus that eliminated key barriers. However, after a year, Mott was highly frustrated since most of the departments, such as customer service and top management, had not made significant developments. As such, Mott noticed that the newly formed unit never achieved the intended purpose but instead developed into an organizational barrier. The numerous customer surveys showed that many Democrats still perceived the Elite group as incompetent. As a result, Mott decided to read on quality programs utilized by Motorola towards achieving zero defects. Mott resulted in heeding the advice from Dunlap on how to effectively create a unique team of workers that would eliminate mistakes during advertisements. After a year, Mott revived he believe in teams with advertising accuracy rising to around 99%. Interestingly, errors that previously resulted in a revenue loss of approximately $10,000 in a month significantly dropped to near zero.
A survey showed that the ELITE team had made significant improvements since they re-engineered processes in which Democrats sold, created, and produced advertisements. Hence, the newly developed portfolio helped the firm achieve its theme on customer obsession through cross-cooperation within the team members. From the beginning, Mott provided clear goals that were stipulated to achieve high performance. However, the start was quite challenging since the team kept on blaming each other for their failure without having a clear development plan. Therefore, it is clear that an emotional overhaul by Mott helped galvanize the group’s thinking to make major amendments resulting in in-market success. Hence, commitment proved a key driving factor that helped the ELITE group to correct its errors and eliminate functional barriers by redesigning the entire process. For instance, some of the team members came for work at 4 am to reduce pressure experienced during the day. Presently, the spirit of the ELITE team lives with the democrat based on experiences they learn on a daily basis.
Thesis statement: The ELITE team proved to be transformative as they embarked on addressing errors as they aimed at creating customer obsession.