Learning about these stages of teamwork not only helped me in the classroom with my group projects, but has also helped me at my job as a waitress at Grill Marks in Columbia, SC, where I work in a team with the rest of the waitstaff, bartenders, cooks and managers each night. Working at a large and busy restaurant is very stressful, and only runs smoothly when everyone is working together as a team to provide each customer with the best possible service. Every night I work with a different group of people and I have to use the Tuckman model. The forming phase starts when we first come in for our shift and the restaurant is calm before the rush starts. During the storming stage is when the business starts to tick up and chaos starts to happen. People start grabbing the wrong food, aren’t communicating with each other, and servers such as myself routinely get annoyed with the other positions because our food or drinks aren’t coming out fast enough. This is a high-tension environment when my manager typically starts yelling at everyone and side conversations start to form about how other people are totally slacking on their job. As someone who has worked there the longest, I take it upon myself to become the leader of the group and pick up everyone else’s slack to make my manager and the customers happy and to get the place running smoothly again. This is when the norming stage starts to begin. My coworkers are starting to learn what they are doing wrong, and when people start to confront each other and tell them what they have to do. During the performing stage things seem a lot calmer and everyone is a lot less stressed. The customer service tends to be at its all-time high during this stage, and people are helping each other If needed.
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Pictured above is a positive Yelp review from a customer that I served back in August. This review is proof of how smoothly the restaurant runs when the team is at its peak preforming stage and everyone is working together to keep the customers happy. The Yelp review shows that we had successfully gotten to the preforming stage with the comment "food and server wist it was a 5 all the way. I would recommend and we will return."
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