Nascar’s Racing Teams

In what ways do Evernham’s leadership tactics prove consistent with the characteristics and ideas on high performance team and teamwork advanced in the text?In this case obviously Evernham implemented very useful technic from the strategy to reach the goal. He also influence his team with the way Evernham thinking such as shaping the chair in the office with a circle and believe that it could be build the strength for the team even it’s very comfort to the team to sharing and get their own. It means Evernham can cultivate a positive working environment with spreading ideas about leadership and teamwork. Beside that Evernham also emphasize on strong principle to be implemented such as painstaking preparation, egoless teamwork, and thoroughly original strategizing. Make sure members have the right skills also implemented by Evernham to support the performance. Every member must have the necessary skills, commitment, ownership, and teamwork to advance the vision. Because of that clear understanding in a team can build together through Evernham ideas that very effective not only just efficient.

If you were hired as Jeff Gordon’s new pit crew chief, what team norms would you expected to be in place? Actually team norms are very important in a team because from positive norm it can cultivate the spirit among members in a team. In this situation, we will expect every members in a team can aware about the expectation required and send it clearly among the members so we can understanding each of us better. This is one of the key of success. Other norm, we would expect high achievement norm, so we have clear target and it is positive. It means with a high achievement norm everyone should be hunger to win and paying close attention to every detail of the job to achieve the desired outcome. A norm of close family among members’ also important things to starts all of expectation that needs to be achieved. What can someone who takes over a highly successful team from a leader like Evernham do to maintain and even improve team success in the future? First, if we analyze the case, we must understand how Evernham thinks in order to understand the concept of the work. Evernahm generates the strong beliefs about “Team IQ”.

Every member expected to be creative and innovative and share their idea by using “Circle of Strength”. Evernham also mentioned that everyone should feel as if his signature is on the finished product. To achieve the high performance team, first, the team needs to develop and operate with positive team performance norm. Leader and team member always act as a positive role model. It is important for the power of team building and hold regular meeting. Second, the team should keep the cohesiveness high. It means that the team should get agreement, increase homogeneity, enhance interaction within the team, and make team smaller, competition focus on other team, reward team results, and keep team together. The third one, the team should eliminate disruptive behaviors. Disruptive behaviors bring about working less hard, performing less well, being late and absent more, and reducing their commitment. Another thing that needs to be discussed is about the team leader. As a team leader we need to manage our team really well. First, we have to diverse and analyze our team into group.

One group is tough battler, another friendly helper, or they can be categorized as objective thinker. Next, we have to giving clear role to team member. Team tends to perform better when their members have clear and realistic expectation regarding their tasks or job. Next we have to lead the member to the feeling about collectively accountable. Foundation of high-performance team work, also achievement of collectively accountable is high team cohesiveness. Research question: Pit crews are often in the news. See what you can find out about pit crew performance. Ask: What distinguishes the “high performance pit crews from the “also rans?” Example of High performance pit crew. First is Steve Letarte (Dale Earnhardt Jr.) Steve Letarte established himself as one of the better crew chiefs in the business during a six-year run atop the war wagon for Jeff Gordon, leading the driver of the No. 24 to 10 wins and 15 poles, not to mention finishes of 11th, sixth, second, seventh, third and ninth. When Earnhardt moved to Hendrick Motorsports in 2008 and struggled with both performance and communication issues under crew chiefs Tony Eury Jr. and Lance McGrew, team owner Rick Hendrick decided to shift Letarte to become Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s crew chief in 2011 and the results were almost instantaneous.

Earnhardt had four top-five and 12 top-10s in 2011, making the Chase for the Sprint Cup for the first time in four years under Letarte’s tutelage. Things were even better in 2012: Earnhardt finally snapped a 142-race winless streak that dated back to 2008, and added 10 top-five and 20 top-10 finishes. He had arguably the best first 26 races of his career last year, hovering around first place in the standings for most of that time before suffering a concussion during the Chase that forced him to miss two races and ended his championship hopes. Earnhardt was second after the first two races this season before dropping to third in the standings after Sunday’s race in Las Vegas. However, that’s still a strong start, one that will likely continue on just like last season. It may be too early to start thinking Cup championship for Earnhardt this season. But it’s pretty clear that if anyone is going to get him to that level, it’ll be Letarte. Second is Harvick’s crew.

Martin is in his third stint as crew chief for Kevin Harvick, having previously served in 2002 and part of 2003, from 2009 through 2011 and then when Shane Wilson and Harvick failed to make much progress in 2012, Martin returned to the No. 29 Chevrolet for the final 12 races—a role that he continues to this day. During that stint, he’s led Harvick to nine wins, not to mention spearheading two wins for Clint Bowyer when he was still part of Richard Childress Racing. All told, Martin has 12 Cup wins as a crew chief. With Harvick leaving RCR at the end of this season to join Stewart Haas Racing in 2014, Martin could become one of the most-sought free agents as well when Harvick departs. Example for “also rans” pit crew. Jimmy Johnson and No. 48 crew. They fired their pit crew and change to Gordon’s for the rest of the race and now the rest of the years. To build team development, we need to understand five points. First is forming, we should getting to know each other. Storming, dealing with tensions and defining group tasks. Norming, building relationships and working together. Performing, maturing in relationship and task performance. Adjourning, disbanding and celebrating accomplishment. Frequent change in team makes team members concentrate only one “forming” and “storming” stage of development, making it hard for them to move on to the next stages. It will create less possibility for team work.

References:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1563101-ranking-the-11-most-intelligent-crew-chiefs-in-nascar-today/page/8http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1563101-ranking-the-11-most-intelligent-crew-chiefs-in-nascar-today/page/2http://bleacherreport.com/articles/512498-jimmie-johnson-swaps-pit-crews-with-jeff-gordon-to-improve-championship-chances