Addressing Challenges of Groups and Teams Paper / Team discussion and Individual Paper - Essay Example

One of the most important aspects of the success of the firm is its customer service. The purpose of this paper is to apply the concepts developed in the team training plan to improve the customer service, employee interaction, and supply chain relations at Starbucks Café. In 2009 Starbucks Café generated global sales of $9.8 billion (Starbucks, 2010). The enterprise has 142,000 employees worldwide. The employees of the company are referred by the firm as partners. When a company has such a large workforce distributed across 16,000 locations it realizes that collaboration among the workers is essential to get the job done.

In our team discussions an idea surged about creating a rotating team leader position. Starbucks is an established company that has at each of its stores its own leadership team. The managers and supervisors of the company could change the way employees interact with each other by instituting teams. The team in this case would be informal teams. The purpose of the team is to facilitate the work of the employees of the company by providing assistance, guidance, and teamwork. These informal teams can incorporate the team leader position with a rotating mechanism that allows for the switch of team leadership to occur at predetermined time intervals.

The informal team leadership among the workers could be monitored by the managerial staff in order to determine which employees have potential to become a part of the administration of the stores. Customer service is very important at Starbucks because the customers are purchasing what could be classified as a luxury product. The price of a Starbucks coffee is much higher than traditional coffee sold at a mini-mart store. Starbucks provides its customer a product that is superb in quality. One of the practices that allowed the firm to acquired quality coffee in its procurement process is the use of fair trade coffee.

Fair trade coffee is a practice that guarantees poor farmers $1.26 per