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Management

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Feb 20, 2024

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Matthew Powell To begin, I would like to talk about the most dysfunctional team that I have been a part of. During my time at Tyson Foods, I led several projects aimed at continuous improvement or costs savings for the company. Among these projects was the “Data Revitalization Project.” In this project, my aim was to reconstruct the way in which our facility retrieved, organized, monitored, and utilized the data from our production centers. To accomplish this task, I requested a team of people that had direct knowledge in certain areas of the process that could provide direct knowledge of their respective areas. This group had a very high level of experience, ranging from two years to fifteen years in the facility. When initially meeting with the team, they seemed to be very knowledgeable with their respective areas of expertise and seemed to be reluctant to share in-depth information to the whole group. I began noticing a rift within the group as the time went on, and it was causing a strain our ability to effectively overcome obstacles that routinely came up. This led to things like double work, miscommunication, missed deadlines, efficiency issues, etc. In summation, because only some people had information about a certain area of the project, nobody else could effectively operate or make changes in that area without a direct input from that specialist. Consequently, if that person were to not be available, the project would have to come to a halt, or an improvisation would have to be made – often leading to a detrimental consequence to the project. The best group that I have worked with is a very recent team at my current employer, Rough Country Suspension Systems. In hopes of increasing efficiency at our facility, I devised a project aimed at improving the organization of the workstations. To accomplish this task, I assembled a team of people that were involved in relevant areas of the process. This team was comprised of about 10 people and ranged from one month of experience up until seven years

Matthew Powell with the process and facility. Based on my past experience, I decided to make it a point that the team constantly post pass-downs and keep all other stakeholders in the loop at every stage of the project. This decentralized the information and allowed all group members to give input on the changes that were being made. Allowing all of our members to weigh in on obstacles would allow unique perspectives, and everyone continually being informed permitted much more flexibility in the project. We worked more as a unit when solving problems, rather than a just allowing one person to dictate an area in the process. By problem solving in this fashion, we minimized tunnel-vision and increased the buy-in of our team members by giving everyone an equal voice. However, there were some draw backs. This group was very meeting-heavy, and we spent a lot of time discussing about smaller issues in the project. We would often have to spend a lot of resources scheduling around the availability of the majority and it would often be inconvenient for some of our team members to make it to the meetings. However, the success of the project spoke for itself and it seemed like the team had a lot of satisfaction working together to achieve our results. In the analysis that I did on these two groups, I noticed that they had very different scores. The Tyson group scored well below average in credibility (7) and coordination (7). This seems to be spot on, given the negative effects that stemmed from the team’s actions. In contrast, the Rough Country team scored above average in these areas but was one point below average in the “specialization” category (11). I believe this is due to the collective nature of the group, and the process in how we operated as a unit.

Matthew Powell Comparatively, these groups were not inherently better than the other. I think the biggest determining factor was the availability of the information. I think that the people truly enjoyed being well informed and having the ability to contribute to all stages in the process regardless of their position within the company. I think that my team at Tyson Foods had a very centralized TMS, and this allowed a lot of “blind spots” to appear in our project. However, I do think there was value in having experts in certain areas that were capable of making decision on the fly. Next time I have a team at Rough Country, I’m going to try and find a middle ground. I want to try and have a “champion” for certain areas in the process that can make smaller decision on the fly, however they would still consult the group when making large ones. In summation, my aim is to find that balance between specialization, credibility, and coordination in the future.

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