1- What were the stages of development of the ELITE team? Identify specific examples of each stages of team development case.

2- How do you explain the team's reaching a high-performance condition? What were the major predictive factors?

3- Why didn't Mott's top management team reach a high level of performance? What was his team lacking? Why was an ELITE team needed?

4- Make recommendations about what Mott should do now to capitalize on the ELITE team experience. If you were to become a consultant to the Tallahassee Democrat, what advice would you give Mott about how he can capitalize on team building?

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 cus- tomer 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 dead- lines. People at the paper also had evidence beyond surveys. In one instance, for