Acme Minerals Extraction Company

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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”.

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