Cold Stone Creamery Team

Creating Effective Teams: a Guide for Members and Leaders is a book by Wheelan (2013) designed to do as the title states; guiding members and leaders to create effective teams. Wheelan (2013) begins the book by highlighting the reasons that groups are important. Wheelan (2013) states that throughout history, “Groups have played a major role in both the survival of human beings and the development of human culture” (p. 1). The majority of the book is based on 4 stages that create a group of individuals into an effective team. The first stage is called dependency and inclusion. According to Wheelan (2013), the first stage of the group is

There is no doubt that Cold Stone Creamery’s team is going to be one of the top priorities for the company since it’s the main reason why this company is so successful. In the video the term “team” is defined as a group of workers with a shared mission, vision, and collective responsibilities. A team shares a role-trade leadership role. Team members are accountable to one another. They measure their effectiveness by accessing the output of their collective labours. In Cold Stone Creamery’s team, there are customers, crews, franchisees, area developers, members of Creamery, and marketing. No matter what job he or she does, each team member plays a role in the team’s success.

A successful team can be represented by various characteristics which include respect for one another, a sense of purpose, commitment to the aims of the team which are demonstrated every day by each team member and regular communication between team members.

A team is something more than a collection of individuals. Teamwork is a group of people working together to achieve the same goal. The whole is more than a sum of the parts. A team can be identified by evidence of some or all of the following:

A team is a group of people working together in a related field to achieve an agreed goal, target or objective. In order to attain the overall goal activities and tasks are shared between the team members with give individuals their roles and responsibilities.

What is teamwork? Teamwork is defined as "a formal work group consisting of people who work together intensely to achieve a common group goal." (University of Phoenix, Apollo Library, 2007). A group becomes a team when members demonstrate a commitment to one another to reach a common goal. There is a high degree of cohesiveness and accomplishment in a team. Simply put two heads are often better than one. (University of Phoenix, Apollo Library, 2007). Teamwork can help us communicate in many ways.

There is a saying that many hands make light work. The essence of this statement is that more can be achieved as a collective than individually. We all have different skills, knowledge and personal attributes. By utilizing all of these different aspects in a team, more ideas can be generated. As more ideas are generated, more creative solutions are generated, leading to better results. It is amazing the amount of support that is created in teams, especially when the going gets tough. People will often go to what seems like extreme lengths when they know that they can rely on the support and encouragement of the team. Never underestimate the significance of this in

However, there was no evidence of teamwork in this video. There was no defined process of people working together to accomplish a common goal, which is the definition of teamwork. Instead there was a group of knowledgeable people, who did not want responsibility and had no initiative for such project. In fact, Tuckman’s group development model should have been added to the agenda as a refresher course for all members. Schermerhorn defines Tuckman’s development model in stages. Stage 1 of the model is forming, and this was evident in the beginning of the meeting with the initial formation of the group discussing where tasks are understood by members and resources and information that delegated by the leader, in this case Joe. But it wasn’t long into the meeting where storming was evident. Individuals began to question and challenge the given task. Members disagree on the goal of the team and resist the given task. At this point personal to emotional excuses began to surface. I do not think I witnessed the rest of the stages, except the adjourning part. There was no norming stage where the team moves toward harmonious working practices where there is agreement. In fact, Joe the acting leader had to assign different tasks according to his perception of each one. And there was no performing stage displaying functional, interdependent roles that were focused on the performance of the group tasks among the members. In fact, group cohesiveness was not

After viewing the video on Cold Stone Creamery it is pretty obvious that teamwork permeates through everything they do. They define a team as a group of workers that have a shared mission and vision while also sharing the same responsibilities. This definition makes a lot of sense to me while thinking about how teamwork is defined. If I had to define team work in my own words it would be a group of colleagues working on a task together with efficiency that also has a specific end goal in mind. For example at my church we serve complimentary coffee to the guests that attend our services. A team of 2 or 3 people prepares and serves at each service. We arrive about an hour before the service starts. We take care of all the setup, serving, and clean up together. If not too many guests come to that particular service it isn’t too busy for us. On a busy night like Christmas Eve theirs is lots of people and they all want coffee. With enough people to serve everything goes smoothly. I’ve served by myself before and it’s much easier with a good team

All with differing skills and levels of experience, to allow a service to be provided efficiently and effectively. Each member of the team has a purpose and a function within that team, so the overall success depends on a functional interdependency. There is usually not as much room for conflict when working as a team. The team also does not rely on groupthink to arrive at its conclusions.

That being said, what does nearly every effective “team” or “group” have in common? A proficient leader, captain, manager, etc. Working well in a team includes members being able to complete individual tasks and goals, as well as being able to work together to complete overall organizational level tasks and goals as a unit. Everyone needs to be able to thrive off each other in

The complexity of teamwork is more than what Merriam-Webster defines teamwork as “the work done by people who work together to do something”. Teamwork involves good practices and strategies utilized in a cohesive manner to get to a common goal. Therefore a clear definition of a team must first be established in order to further understand the complexity of the teamwork process. A team is a collection of two or more people with either similar or different disciplines dedicated to the pursuit of a specific goal (Gilbert, 2004). Hence, the determinant in the level of participation from team members for a functioning team is a joint commitment (Gilbert, 2004).

To fully discuss this topic, we must start with a simple definition of a team. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith define a team in their best-selling book The Wisdom of Teams (Harper Business Essentials 1994), as

A team is different from a group and have its own unique traits.A group interacts primarily to share information and to make decisions to help each member do his or her job more efficiently and effectively. There’s no need or opportunity for work groups to engage in collective work that requires joint effort. On the other hand, work teams are groups whose members work intensely on a specific, common goal using their positive synergy, individual and mutual accountability, and complementary skills. The four most common types of teams are problem-solving teams, self-managed work teams, cross-functional teams, and virtual teams.

Sanne and team have beautifully explained their arguments in favor of teamwork with precise examples. To start with, their differentiation of groups from teams was to the point and any layman could understand the concept of teamwork because of the examples used. For instance, one of the examples that caught my eye in their report was Cohen and Levesque’s example of automobile traffic that was used to