Evo Teamwork

Summary: For years Evo has supported athletic teams, but only recently did

the Seattle-based e-commerce company launch a formal work team. The new

group, which comprises a photographer, designer, and copywriter, is

responsible for producing Evo’s magazine ads, promotions, and website

content. To help the members learn to work together, Nathan Decker, director

of e-commerce, became the team leader. As a skilled negotiator, Decker makes

sure his talented trio steers clear of dysfunction and delivers the goods. Due to

Decker’s leadership and skilful negotiation of conflicts, members of the creative

services team are learning how to communicate in ways never before possible.

Task: Read the “Evo Teamwork” case below and then consider the following

questions.

>> If you've got all these great ideas and you're an entrepreneur, then

understand your limits. Like what are you good at? What are you not good at?

Don't be afraid to let certain things go. I mean, to think that, you know, one

thing we've been pretty good at if we can credit ourselves with anything is that

we've really understood like, you know, where our talents lie and where we

need to go out there and get the best talent to augment like what we're doing.

My name is Bryce Fillips, and I am the founder of EVO. If someone like me

was thinking about the burden of running every aspect, every operational aspect

of the company, then we wouldn't be here. I mean, first of all, I'm not a good
operator and there's certain structures that I don't bring to the table that you need

in a good business.

>> So I think our organization is set up fairly well to accomplish the goals and

strategies that we have in place. I think there's always room for improvement.

My name is Nathan Decker, I am the senior human OD commerce at EVO.

>> One area that I can think of is our creative services team that we just started

in the last three or four months. Before we had [inaudible], we had a graphic

designer that lived over here in one department. We had a photographer that

lived in another department. And then we had some copy editors that sort of did

their own thing. So we've tried to consolidate those creative resources into one

unit to hopefully find some synergies and improve the creative output. That's

been a really tough challenge. And I think learning how to make the creative

process more of a group reality has been a challenge. And I think that's

somewhere that we continually need to work on.

>> I'd say the best example would be like working on a magazine ad together.

Hi, I'm Tre, and I'm a photographer here and I'm part of our creative services

team. If I just pick out images and they don't work out and the layout, it

becomes a problem if the copy is super cute and friendly, but it's like a very

core focused ad. I mean it's not going to come across as one unified ad.

>> What are the design priorities that we're working on right now?
>> I'm pretty sure that we're going to go with something new but extremely

simple.

>> I think of Nathan a little bit as a leader of the team. He's more of a project

sponsor and like he's more of a director, I'd say. Like he has specific numbers

that he needs to hit and, you know, return on investment. And he definitely

comes in to make sure that we're on task. Like do we need any more resources,

what's going well, what's not working well? How can we speed up this process?

How can we do things better? How can we work together better and get a

quicker end product for less money?

>> And so how we've managed that so far, we're doing, we introduced a post

mortem process for each project that we work on that talks about, you know,

what happened, what went well, what didn't go well, and how can we do it

better in the future?

>> And once you make owners for each of those categories, then the next one's

just going to get better.

>> So I'm thinking about just talking about step by step what happened for the

execution of the promo.

>> It really helps try to get some sort of uniform language in the team. We're

doing a better job at like, oh, maybe you need the message isn't reading well. Or

maybe you think that it's not popping off the page enough, you know, and we
can fix that just by some contrast or adding some different elements. Instead of

just, well, I'm obviously the expert. Why would you even suggest something

stupid? It creates a mess. It's like middle school again. Try to get away from

that. If something does happen, it's like, hey, you want to go grab a cup of

coffee and like, you know, I was kind of hurt when you said this photo sucked.

You know, I put a lot of work into it, and, you know, maybe you can talk about

things I can do better instead of like why it sucked. Trying to think of positive

feedback instead of just negative stuff I think is the biggest thing to focus on.

We are such a new team and if we had someone right away that like structured

it and made it easy like I don't think we would communicate as well together.

>> And this may come across as fairly, you know, weak, but we're trying to

encourage people to talk about their priorities. And kind of raise a hand when

they feel like the projects that have been put on them are too much. So that's, the

honest is really on the manager to figure that out. But it's also on the employee

to basically raise a flag and say, look, this is a little bit too much. And that's not

met with any kind of combination or, you know, repercussion. It's just like,

actually that's a good thing, thank you for bringing that up. Let's do that again.

>> Right now like although Nathan's trying to like lead us and direct us, it

would be really awesome to have a creative director. It would make sense to

have someone creative driven with great organizational skills that, you know,

maybe not be an expert in every field but really understand how important each
field is. So that they would process all the requests that come into our

department and be able to be like, all right, this one's obviously the most

important. This one's going to take more time.

>> Learning how to make the creative process more of a group reality has been

a challenge. And I think that's somewhere that we continually need to work on.

>> Yeah, so we went through and talked about upcoming promotions. Both e

mail promotions and website promotions. And it talked about who needs to

deliver what by when to make sure.

>> If you're excited about a, you know, a market opportunity or a new concept

or something that you think has legs, then identify that concept. You know,

think about the right kind of people and the right kind of talent you need in the

room to execute on a good plan. And then build that team. I mean, at the end of

the day it's going to come down to the team of people. I mean, if, there's, I don't

know one person that brings everything to the table and can the whole show. It

just doesn't happen. You need to really understand what are you really good at?

What gets you excited? What are you passionate about? And then make sure

that you're bringing in kind of the right group of people to augment kind of what

you're up to and then that's when you're able to really build something cool.

>> The sizing is kind of finicky when you get down to the youth sizing.
>> We have like a marketing kind of e-commerce department. We have a

customer care team to take care of customers. We have a buying team that

manages all of our inventory. We have an IT team that supports all the different

needs of the business which are very diverse. And then we have a store staff that

kind of meets the needs here locally. So, yeah, I mean, I think generally if you

look at the buckets of, you know, the different areas of responsibility, they're

pretty well defined to achieve a lot of our objectives. But there are paying points

when you get more granular and you look at certain areas. So and those are the

spots we're going to really work on improving.

>> Okay, great.

>> Saying that we're more efficient than our competitors is a bit of speculation.

I don't know their books, I don't see their books. But I know that we are able to

beat their prices by five percent. So the fact that we're able to do that and stay in

business tells me we're doing something right.

Questions:

1. (a) What organizational dilemma was hurting Evo’s creative output?

(b) How did management resolve the problem using teams?
2. (a) Describe the “norming” stage.
(b) How might Nathan Decker lead effectively as the team starts
“norming”?
3. (a) What are the factors that affect group performance?
(b) Relate these factors to Evo.