BU 502 Unit 8 team development plan example

May to October, One Owner per Step and Five Numbers That Are Hard to Fake: A Team Development Plan for a Composite Moving Company's Coordination Team Through Peak Season

Student Name

Business, Herzing University

BU 502: Leadership and Team Dynamics

Instructor Name

May 25, 2026

May to October, One Owner per Step and Five Numbers That Are Hard to Fake: A Team Development Plan for a Composite Moving Company's Coordination Team Through Peak Season

The Diagnosis and the Target in Brief

The move coordination team adds jobs to days it has already closed, a book-first, fit-later pattern rewarded at every step and concentrated where estimators hand work to the others, as Units 3 and 4 showed. The handover from estimators to the others is also where members are least willing to admit errors or disagree in the room, as Unit 6 found. The Unit 7 intervention replaces the private route for late additions with a held list, a daily 3 p.m. decision and a Friday debrief. This plan sequences that intervention from May to October 2026, through the June to August peak, and says what evidence would show real movement.

The Sequence

Every step has one owner, named by role. The pilot runs on month-end days first because they produce the most post-close additions, which gives the fastest test, and because starting small during the start of peak season limits the damage if the process fails.

Coaching Through the Phases

The debriefs themselves follow the pattern that Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) found effective in their meta-analysis: a short, regular review held soon after the work, covering what happened, what helped and what to change. Hackman and Wageman (2005) argue that team coaching works best when its focus matches the team's point in its work: motivational at the start, strategic around the midpoint and educational at the end. The plan follows that timing. In Phase 1 the Friday debriefs focus on whether people are using the held list at all and on the effort it takes. In Phase 2, around the midpoint, they shift to whether the closing rule itself is right, for example whether Saturdays need a larger reserve of trucks. In Phase 3 they review what the team learned and what to keep. I will keep a one-line record of each debrief, the main change agreed and who owns it, so the Phase 3 review has more than memory to work from and so a member who misses a Friday can see what was decided.

Evidence That the Team Moved

Campbell (1979) warned that the more an indicator is used to make decisions, the more it is exposed to pressures that distort it. The plan therefore separates indicators the team could produce to look compliant from ones that are harder to fake.

Success by October means fewer than ten jobs added outside the held list in eight weeks, Saturday problems from late changes cut by half, and self-reported errors and open disagreement rising across the seam. If the first two indicators improve while the last two do not, the team has complied with a process without becoming safer to speak in, and the plan says so in the review.

Risks and Responses

Peak season is the main risk. When a customer insists on a full Saturday in July, the general manager may override the held process. The response is an agreed exception rule from Phase 0: overrides are allowed, recorded on the held list and reviewed on Friday, so they become data rather than a route around the process. A second risk is that estimators lose bookings and stop cooperating. The held list records every refusal, which turns the cost into the evidence for Phase 3. A third is that I leave or am absent; the closing rule and the 3 p.m. check are written into the team's board guide so they do not depend on me. A fourth risk is that the Friday debrief turns into a place where estimators are blamed for every late change, which would deepen the quiet Unit 6 found. The response is a rule for the debrief itself: each change is described by what happened and what helped, never by who caused it, and I will step in if the discussion turns to individuals.

My Own Development Within the Plan

Unit 5 found me active on details and passive on the structural question. Three commitments follow. I will hold fortnightly check-ins with each estimator from June, as I already do with the rest of the team. In the Friday debrief I will speak last. And in Phase 0 I will state, in the huddle, the purpose of the team in terms larger than the next day's schedule, a direction I have never given. The open question I asked four members after Unit 5 produced one answer from three of them, to settle things in the room rather than afterward, and the debrief is where I will practice doing that.

References

Campbell, D. T. (1979). Assessing the impact of planned social change. Evaluation and Program Planning, 2(1), 67-90. https://doi.org/10.1016/0149-7189(79)90048-X

Hackman, J. R., & Wageman, R. (2005). A theory of team coaching. Academy of Management Review, 30(2), 269-287. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2005.16387885

Tannenbaum, S. I., & Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do team and individual debriefs enhance performance? A meta-analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231-245. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018720812448394