Target's Effective Teamwork

“The ability of organizations to be skilled at teamwork and building high performance teams is a major key to competitive advantage and may very well determine the future success or failure of many organizations” (Warrick, 2014, p. 68). To have a successful team, there needs to be compatible teamwork. To have this, motivation must be present, which requires the right coach or leader to provide that. Target’s CEO does exactly that. Starting from the bottom in 1979, Gregg Steinhafel can relate to each team member, as well as the different positions moving up through the chain. In the article, “How Target’s CEO Inspires Teamwork At a Massive Scale,” by Lydia Dishman, Steinhafel describes his experience in realizing that there is no I in team at

Target and everything is done through a large collaboration. He shares that Target has a $100 billion sales goal within five years and a way to help achieve that goal is through teamwork. As Dishman discusses (2012), “Mentorship is baked into Target’s playbook, he contends, to develop leaders that really invest in their own teams.

There are customized one-on-one programs that begin at the point of hire that Steinhafel argues have been perfected to a science. ‘Everyone is a mentor and mentee. It is one of the fun and exciting parts of [any] job’”. Additionally, team members of Target are encouraged and motivated to use Target’s channels of social media, such as Facebook and RedTalk to stay connected, joint groups and receive announcements. “There are also company-wide initiatives to gather feedback and improve things at a granular level. For the latter, Steinhafel says each year, all 365,000 team members are encouraged to complete a survey about what’s working and what’s not. "We get well over 300,000 responses,’ Steinhafel asserts” (Dishman, 2012). If the team members feel as though their opinions matter and management take them seriously, this could create stronger team work and empowerment as well as give management a better idea on what customers are also thinking about the products. “There's the phrase ‘happy wife, happy life,’ but for those working in the service industry it’s more like ‘happy worker, happy customer’ “ (Petroginnais,

2014). Providing team members the opportunity to consider their interests within a organization will not only help create the best experience for them but will also create the best experience for customers. If the customers and team members are happy, the business has a high probability of success. Overall, this results from a correct form of leadership or coaching through motivation of teamwork.