Executive Summary
The Harvard Business School’s Army Crew Case (Polzer & Snook, 2004) touches upon several issues including: leadership, coaching techniques, team dynamics, and trust. Coach Preczewski faces many options on how to fix his under performing varsity crew team. The fact that both the coach and the students, have underwent rigorous and systematic evaluations to determine the best performing members for the boat, contributes to an underlying level of frustration for the crew and the coach. Preczewski has known for sometime that his crew’s problems were psychological, rather than physical. After the group meeting, Coach Preczewski finally understands the magnitude of these problems and now has only four days to tackle the issue and bring the Varsity Crew’s performance up to a competitive level. Although this is a relatively short amount of time, great improvements can be made for relatively little investment. Coach Preczewski should continue with the intervention that addresses the root of the problem, the team’s psychological dysfunction, as opposed to continuing to try to develop a solution around the core issue.
Core Issues
The first issue to understand is team viability, that is, the team member’s satisfaction and willingness to contribute. Crew relies heavily on teamwork and requires all eight members of the boat to move synchronously in order to achieve maximum performance, “like eight guys all trying to do the perfect golf swing at the same time, all together, 200 times in a row”. Coach Preczewski did not sufficiently facilitate the kind of team building necessary for success: discussing team goals, establishing a sense of trust or leadership, and recognizing the pote ...