Minicase Integrating Teams at Hernandez & Associates Marco Hernandez is president of Hernandez & Associates Inc., a full-service advertising agency with clients across North America. The company provides a variety of marketing services to support its diverse group of clients. Whether called on to generate a strategic plan, create interactive websites, or put together a full-blown media campaign, the team at Hernandez & Associates prides itself on creative solutions to its clients' marketing challenges.

The firm was founded in 1990 with an emphasis in the real estate industry. It quickly expanded its client base to include health care, as well as food and consumer products. Like many small firms, the company grew quickly in the "high-flying" 1990s, but its administrative costs to obtain and serve businesses also skyrocketed. And, as with many businesses, the agency's business was greatly affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the economic downturn that followed. Clients' shrinking budgets forced them to scale back their business with Hernandez & Associates, and staff cutbacks meant that clients needed more marketing support services as opposed to full-scale campaigns.

Hernandez & Associates now faced a challengeto adapt its business to focus on what the clients were asking for. Specifically, clients, with their reduced staffs, were looking for help responding to their customers' requests and looking for ways to make the most of their limited marketing budgets. Its small, cohesive staff of 20 employees needed to make some fast changes.

As president of Hernandez & Associates, Marco Hernandez knew his team was up for the challenge. He had worked hard to build an environment to support a successful teamhe recruited people who had solid agency experience, and he consistently communicated the firm's mission to his team. He made sure the team had all the resources it needed to succeed and continually took stock of these resources. He had built his team as he built his business and knew the group would respond to his leadership. But where to start? Getting the team to understand that growth depended on a shift in how it served its clients was not difficulteach of the employees of the small firm had enough contact with the clients that they knew client needs were changing. But making significant changes to the status quo at Hernandez & Associates would be difficult. Group roles had to changecreative folks had to think about how to increase a client's phone inquiries and website visits; account people needed a better understanding of the client's desire for more agency leadership. And everyone needed a better sense of the costs involved. The company as a whole required a more integrated approach to serving clients if they hoped to survive. Marco needed a plan.

1. Like many leaders, Marco has a team in place and does not have the luxury of building a new team to adapt to the changing business environment his firm now faces. Use the TLM to help Marco diagnose the problems faced by the firm and identify leverage points for change.

a. Consider the major functions of the Team Leadership Modelinput, process, and output. Where do most of the firm's challenges fall? b. What are the team's goals for outputs?

2. Identify potential resources for Marco and his team in implementing a strategy to change the way they do business at Hernandez & Associates.

Team Leadership Model: Because we have emphasized that leadership is a group or team function and have suggested that one measure of leadership effectiveness may be whether the team achieves its objectives, it is reasonable to examine a model specifically designed to help teams perform more effectively: the Team Leadership Model (TLM)47, 48, 49 (shortened from earlier versions that called it the Team Effectiveness Leadership Model). Another way to think of this model is as a mechanism to first identify what a team needs to be effective, and then to point the leader either toward the roadblocks that are hindering the team or toward ways to make the team even more effective than it already is. This approach is similar to McGrath's50 description of leadership, which suggested that the leader's main job is to determine the team's needs and then take care of them. This approach also will require us to think about leadership not as a function of the leader and his or her characteristics but as a function of the team. As the title of the model suggests, team effectiveness is the underlying driver.

We have mentioned this model of group or team effectiveness briefly before, but now we will explore it in greater detail. The original model for examining the "engine of a group" was developed by Richard Hackman and has been the basis for much research on groups and teams over the last 30 years.51 The model presented here includes major modifications by Ginnett and is an example of a leadership model that has been developed primarily using field research. While there have been controlled experimental studies validating portions of the model,52 the principal development and validation have been completed using actual high-performance teams operating in their own situational contexts. Examples of the teams studied in this process include commercial and military air crews in actual line flying operations, surgical teams in operating suites, executive teams, product development and manufacturing teams, combat teams, fire department teams, and teams preparing the space shuttle for launch. A complete illustration of the model will be shown later. Because of its complexity, it is easier to understand by starting with a few simpler illustrations.

At the most basic level, this model (see Figure 12.2) resembles a systems theory approach with inputs at the base (individual, team, and organizational factors), processes or throughputs in the center (what the team does to convert inputs to outputs and what we can tell about the team by observing team members at work), and outputs at the top (how well the team did in accomplishing its objectives, ideally a high-performance team). It is often helpful to think of these components as parts of a metaphorical iceberg. While almost everyone can see the outputs of the team (the portion of the iceberg above the waterline), and some can see the processes, most of the inputs are in the organizational background (or underwater, in the iceberg metaphor). But anyone who has seen an iceberg recognizes that most of its mass is the part that is underwaterand this part supports the part that is visible. So it is with the leadership work in teams. Much of the leadership work is done in the background, and many of the components may be developed before the team is constituted. As we will see, the leader's job is to create the conditions for the team to be effective, and much of that work is done at the input level.

As helpful as the iceberg is as a metaphor, an iceberg is unwieldy and a little messy in a classroom. Therefore, the TLM will be presented from here on as a four-sided pyramid or, for those more geometrically gifted, a square pyramid. We will examine each of the major systems theory stages (input, process, output) as they apply to the TLM. However, we will proceed through the model in reverse orderlooking at outputs first, then the process stage, and then inputs.

Outputs What do we mean by outputs? Quite simply, outputs (see Figure 12.3) are the results of the team's work. For example, a football team scores 24 points. A production team produces 24 valves in a day. A tank crew hits 24 targets on an artillery range. Such raw data, however, are insufficient for assessing team effectiveness.

How do we know if a team's output is good? How do we know if a team is effective? Even though it was possible for the three teams just mentioned to measure some aspect of their work, these measurements are not helpful in determining their effectiveness, either in an absolute sense or in a relative sense. For comparison and research purposes, it is desirable to have some measures of team effectiveness that can be applied across teams and tasks. Hackman53 argued that a group is effective if (1) the team's productive output (goods, services, decisions) meets the standards of quantity, quality, and timeliness of the people who use it; (2) the group process that occurs while the group is performing its task enhances the ability of the members to work as members of a team (either the one they were on or any new teams they may be assigned to in the future); and (3) the group experience enhances the growth and personal well-being of the individuals who compose the team.