Acme Minerals Extraction Company

Acme Minerals Extraction Company

A long time ago, work used to be assigned only to one person and that person was in charge of doing only that task. Then, with the new technology innovations, we start seeing how companies started to trained some employees to be what they usually called “multi-tasking employees”. Since technology kept changing and became more advanced companies realized that having “multi-tasking employees” was not enough to satisfy the market demands and the production problems they were having at that moment. In other to solve these problems, group of employees were assigned different tasks, and without probably knowing, they started to form what we know today “teams”. Nowadays, big and small companies tend to believe that the solution to their problems is creating teams. Even though this thought could be right, it doesn’t mean teams are for everybody and work the same way everywhere.

This is probably what happened to our friends from the Acme Minerals Extraction Company. ACME wanted to introduce teams in an effort to improve morale and productivity problems in its Wichita plant. It had two groups: the “brains” who were geologists, geophysicists and engineer who worked with sophisticated technology and the “brawn” who were skilled and semi-skilled workers in charge of the underground extracting operations. To solve the differences between these two groups the company hired the services of a consultant, Suzanne Howard. She had a stroke of luck because a 39 year-career experience employee at ACME agreed to help her, Donald Peterson. Mr. Peterson, due to his vast experience, knew very well the discrepancies between both groups. Both, working together, formed our first type of group: task force team.

A “task force team” is a temporary team assembled to investigate a specific issue or problem (Team Building Inc, 2001-2007). As I said before, they were in charge of bridging the gap between both teams and make them successful at work. These two teams belong to our second type of team: functional team. This type of team has a distinct membership and clear boundaries. Members perform regular and ongoing work, usually in one functional area (Deborah L. Duarte, 2006). ACME had three functional groups or teams at the Wichita plant and I quote from the case study: “operations, made up primarily of hourly workers who operated and maintained the extracting equipment; the “below ground” group, consisting of engineers, geologists, and geophysicists who determined where and how to drill; and the “above ground” group of engineers in charge of cursory refinement and transportation of the minerals”. The first thing they did was to try to have both groups to talk each other, so the scheduled “free participation” meetings. It took six months for these meetings to be, like the case says and I quote “…problem-solving discussions that led to many improvements”. Another thing they did was to create SPITS (Select a Problem and Implement a Tailored Solution), multi-division teams created to solve problems that emerged at the discussion meetings. From the free participation meetings, informal meetings came up with employees participating in softball games and social events. Everything Mrs. Howard and Mr. Peterson did worked great.

After being so successful at the Wichita plant, the company wanted to do the same at the Lubbock plant. The company, once again, decided that Mrs. Howard was the right person to lead the program at the Lubbock plant. This time, at the Lubbock plant, she did not have the support of a person like Mr. Peterson. Howard and her team tried their best but what worked before did not work at the Lubbock plant. For company situations like this is that I still believe in the sentence I stated at the beginning of this case study, founded by Holpp’s book reading, that says: “even though teams could be right for companies, it doesn’t mean teams are for everybody and work the same way everywhere”.

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Unfortunately, we don’t have step by step all the details about how exactly Mrs. Howard and Mr. Peterson developed and executed the plan at the Wichita or Lubbock plant to compare them. We don’t know how bad the situation was at the Lubbock plant between employees neither. All I know, and in what I can base my answer, is that at the Wichita plant the employees had somebody, from their own “family”, to trust while the Lubbock employees had only the new “threat” to trust, and I said “threat” because based on my own experience working with other people, that was the way my co-workers used to see new managers or supervisors at work.

While I was working at the Hewlett Packard Company at