The Chattanooga Ice Cream Division Case

The Chattanooga Ice Cream was one of the three divisions of Chattanooga Food Corporation. Since 1992 the sales flattered and profits declined consistently. While US per capita consumption of ice cream diminished, the competition in its market increased considerably.In order to remediate the division’s performance, Chattanooga Ice Cream took several actions which included the promotion of Charles Moore to head of the division in 1993, the hiring of a new vice president of marketing, Barry Walkins, and of Stephanie Krane to upgrade the division’s information systems and control function, the introduction of a line of frozen yogurt and the closing of its original manufacturing plant to reduce costs.

Despite these actions, the company’s profit continued declining. In 1996, the division’s third largest customer decided to replace Chattanooga with one of its competitors. Charles Moore decided to call the group together to figure out how to save the division from its downturn.All the senior managers were present at the meeting: Barry Walkins, he is very creative and had a good intuitive sense of what consumers wanted but disorganized and often lacks follow through; Billy Fale, who is a very knowledgeable and disciplined vice president of production but a bit rigid in his thinking and anchored in the past; Kent Donaldson, vice president of research and development who had conflicts with Walkins; Les Holly, the division’s sales manager who has a tendency to withhold information and sometimes does not follow through; and Stephanie Krane, who had a strong record of delivering on her promises.Running the meeting was Charles Moore who, unlike his predecessor who was the division’s indisputable leader for over 30 years, believes in the value of group-based decisions and like to bring people together formally to share information, consult in decisions, and forge consensus.

Since Moore took over the division, he organized weekly staff meetings with results very different to the ones he expected: the department heads were reluctant to opine on any matters outside of their own functional domains.However, in private, they criticized and blame when things were wrong one another. The Head of Division attitude toward this was to ignore such behavior, hoping his senior managers would reconcile their differences and change their attitudes after working as a team for a while. After Moore explained with details the firm decision taken by one their customer to replace Chattanooga Ice Cream’s products for the ones of its competition, the senior managers responded by blaming each other for fall in sales.

After being asked for solutions, their responses were either to reduce costs or grow revenues by introducing new products in the market. Both solutions were tried in 1993 with no success. Analysis of the case We can see that the executive team’s recommendations keep in the same line of action even tough when they were not successful in the past. Instead of performing a self assessment of their own department and/or an analysis of the causes that prevented the success of the same type of actions taken by the division in 1993 they keep blaming each other.

Without doubt, this team is facing five basic dysfunctions: •Inattention to results: the tendency of team members to seek out individual recognition and attention at the expense of collective results, i. e. the goals of the entire team •Absence of trust: each team member has a big need for invulnerability which stops the team member for fully participating on the staff meetings •Fear of conflict: there is an artificial harmony among the group.As the senior executives do not trust each other, they do not engage in open, constructive, ideological conflict •Lack of commitment: because of the fear of conflict, team member do not fully express themselves during meetings and they will not feel like they have been listened.

Consequently, they will not buy in decision. •Avoidance of accountability: because they do not buy-in, they do not hold accountable for the decisions taken As a consequence of these five dysfunctions, the team members act as solo performers trying to defend their ego instead of work towards a common goal.Recommendations It is evident that no matter what decision Moore takes to revert to situation of the division, no agreement or at least no real accountability for any agreement will be reached until the heads of department start working as a real team. Some actions that he could take to turn this into a team effort are:•He could hire an expert on team building to organize a workshop far from the office where each team member can do an individual self assessment nd a self-assessment as a team in order to create a trustworthiness environment. They need to understand the dynamic of a team. •Since no one does a self assessment of their own department, he could ask each of the team members to come up with the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities of their own department.

Then, he should lead the team to do an assessment of the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities of their department’s interaction with the other departments.This would help team to overcome their fear of conflict, lack of commitment and avoidance of accountability. •He could certainly be more assertive with his staff members and be more active in resolving conflicts between them instead of ignoring the problems in the team. •He needs to be more open regarding to his feeling and thoughts related to the team dynamics •It would also help that he provides some guidelines and/or agenda to the meetings. •It is also crucial that Moore establishes the goal of the meeting very clearly.