Essay on M2.04 Developing the Work Team

Katzenbach and Smith (1993a) recognise teams as the basic units of performance in organisations and identify a team as '...a small number of people with complimentary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.'

For me, I like to define a team as a group of people who have a same goal that come together to reach that goal and make it a reality. Whether people know it or not they always live and share their life with others as a team. There are family members at their home, work colleagues at their workplace, and teammates in their sport team. There is a team in a relationship. It is something we all need to be

Boston Beer Company (BBC) has enjoyed much success with their craft beers with Samuel Adams as their main focus. Being the leader of this segment, overtopping five of their competitors combined (Exhibit 1), the company now must decide how to take advantage of the light beer market. Boston Lightship, their current light beer, had been a small contributor in BBC’s product line. Currently, it is facing dwindling sales with product volumes down from 12 000 cases per month to 3000 cases per month.

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:

The next project was bottling Gordon Biersch signature beer and retailing it. This had three biggest challenges: this project was entirely Gordon’s baby and demanded time and attention; secondly the freshness of the bottled beer versus the freshly brewed was an issue for which they decided the beer would have a shelf life no longer than three months. Thirdly and the most exciting challenge was the head-to-head competition with other microbreweries and premium beers. Despite the tough competitive environment, Gordon Biersch aimed to achieve 11% of the market in three years (by 1996). This retail venture required huge investment, thus they decided to start small to prove to the investors that they could pull it off.

Teams are an integral component of organizational success. They take on many forms and functions and can have various structures. Teams also conduct a wide variety of projects with goals of innovation or mitigation. An example, from my experience, of a project that required the execution from a team was the establishment of a finished goods inventory program within a paper manufacturing company. A project of this magnitude required that a diverse and multifaceted team be assembled.

A team is a group of people who work together, apply each other's strengths and work on each person's weaknesses. Such unity and hard work can lead to victory, without it a group will not prosper and break under pressure. The movie Miracle and the book Bleachers are both alike but are more different when analyzed in chemistry, coaching technique, and success.

An effective and productive team doesn't just happen. It requires structures, support and processes that encourage development. Team building happens over time. When building and developing a cohesive, effective and productive team you need to determine how your team fits and the roles they play in the organisation. Does anything need to be changed? How and when can these changes be put into action? Organisational, strategic and operational plans need to contain suitable mechanisms for supporting team development.

Teams are more than just groups of people assembled in the same area, they are a collection of individuals dedicated to a common purpose and with a series of detailed performance targets, working together with complementary skills. Teams of people are encountered in various scenarios, not just in the workplace, but also throughout life, such as sports, associations, charities and voluntary services.

The brewing industry can be characterized by Porter’s Five Forces framework. New entries to brewing have a relative ease in creating home micro-breweries, which is aided by

The organization I have chosen to analyze is Ninkasi Brewing Company. “Back in 2005, neither Jamie Floyd nor Nikos Ridge knew exactly where their friendship would lead. What they did know was it would probably center around beer” (Ninkasi, n.d.). In 2006, brewing became a reality for these two friends as they made their first batch of Total Domination IPA inside a leased space within a German restaurant in Springfield, Oregon. Once the small brewery was established and equipped with a 15-barrel brew house, the two decided to name their

One of the largest brewers in the world, Interbrew grew rapidly in the 1990s from its home market in Belgium to a global presence in markets around the world. As this essay will demonstrate, Interbrew 's global strategy of consolidation and market penetration has been balanced between a respect for local autonomy and beer culture with efforts to adapt the flagship brand of Stella Artois to these cultures.

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

This is a team where members work together towards a common goal, under a team leader or supervisor.

Beer Company 2 is a brewer of “seasonal and year-round beers with smaller production volume and higher prices” that “outsources most of its brewing activity” (pg. 120). It is financially conservative, and has undergone a “major cost-savings initiative to counterbalance the recent surge in packaging and freight costs” (pg. 120).