The Tallahassee Democrat's ELITE Team

Essay

The Tallahassee Democrat's ELITE Team
Fred Mott, general manager of the Tallahassee Democrat, the only major newspaper left in Tallahassee, recognized that further growth could never happen unless the paper learned to serve customers in ways "far superior to anything else in the marketplace." There were many challenges to overcome. Ad errors persisted, and sales reps complained of insufficient time with customers. Customer surveys showed that too many advertisers still found the Democrat unresponsive to their needs and too concerned with internal procedures and deadlines. People at the paper also had evidence beyond surveys. In one instance, for example, a sloppily prepared ad arrived through a fax machine looking like a "rat had run across the page." Yet the ad passed through the hands of seven employees and probably would have found its way into print if it had not been literally unreadable! As someone commented, "It was not anyone's job to make sure it was right. If they felt it was simply their job to type or paste it up, they just passed it along." This particular fax, affectionately known as the "rat tracks fax," came to symbolize the essential challenge at the Democrat...
Mott decided to create a special team of workers charged with eliminating all errors in advertisements. He made Dunlap the leader of the team that took on the name ELITE for "ELIminate The Errors."
A year later, under ELITE's leadership, advertising accuracy, never before tracked at the paper, had risen sharply and stayed above 99 percent. Lost revenues from errors, previously as high as $10,000 a month, had dropped to near zero. Ad sales reps had complete confidence in the Advertising Customer Service department's capacity and desire to treat each ad as though the Democrat's existence were at stake. And surveys showed a huge positive swing in advertiser satisfaction. The impact of ELITE, however, went beyond numbers. It completely redesigned the process by which the Democrat sells, creates, produces, and bills for advertisements. More important yet, it stimulated and nurtured the customer obsession and cross-functional cooperation required to make the new process work. In effect, this team of mostly frontline workers transformed an entire organization with respect to customer service.
ELITE had a lot going for it from the beginning. Mott gave the group a clear performance goal (eliminate errors) and a strong mix of skills (12 of the best people from all parts of the paper). He committed himself to follow through by promising, at the first meeting, that "whatever solution you come up with will be implemented." In addition, a corporate "customer obsession" movement helped energize the task force.
But it took more than a good sendoff and an overarching corporate theme to make ELITE into a high-performance team. In this case, the personal commitments began to grow, unexpectedly, over the early months as the team grappled with its challenge. At first, the group spent more time pointing fingers at one another than coming to grips with advertising errors. Only when one of them produced the famous "rat tracks fax" and told the story behind it did the group start to admit that everyone-not everyone else-was at fault. Then, recalls one member, "We had some pretty hard discussions. And there were tears in those meetings."
The emotional response galvanized the group to the task at hand and to one another. And the closer it got, the more focused it became on the challenge. ELITE decided to look carefully at the entire process by which an ad was sold, created, printed, and billed. When it did, the team discovered patterns in the errors, most of which could be attributed to time pressures, bad communication, and poor attitude…
Commitment to one another drove ELITE to expand its aspirations continually. Having started with the charge to eliminate errors, ELITE moved on to break down functional barriers, then to redesigning the entire advertising process, then to refining new standards and measures for customer service, and, finally, to spreading its own brand of "customer obsession" across the entire Democrat... Inspired by ELITE, for example, one production crew started coming to work at 4 A.M., to ease time pressures later in the day...
To this day, the spirit of ELITE lives on at the Democrat. "There is no beginning and no end," says Dunlap. "Every day we experience something we learn from." ELITE's spirit made everyone a winner-the customers, the employees, and management.
-Make recommendations about what Mott should do now to capitalize on the ELITE Team experience. If you were to become a consultant to the Tallahassee Democrat, what advice would you give Mott about how he can capitalize on team building?