THE THIRD KEY: REPLACE HIERARCHICAL THINKING WITH SELF-MANAGED TEAMS

MICHAEL SAW Billy Abrams hurrying toward him as he entered the Customer Service work area. Right away he sensed Billy was a high-energy person like himself—not much on talk and a pragmatist when it came to ideas.

As Billy led Michael through the work area, Michael said, “I sense you’re a busy man, and I want to thank you for taking the time to meet with me. As you may know, I’m here to learn the third key to empowerment.”

“No problem,” said Billy, as if dismissing his last statement. “Tell me, did your company recently go through downsizing?”

“Yes, we did,” answered Michael. “It’s tough being responsible for eliminating jobs.”

“I know what you mean. The same thing happened in this company.”

“But in retrospect, it was absolutely necessary,” Michael quickly added, “to survive and thrive as an organization. To be responsive to customers, we needed a company with as few management layers as possible. But I realize now that while downsizing may create a need for empowerment, it is not anything like empowerment at all. And empowerment is certainly a lot more than authorizing people to make more decisions, which is what I used to think.”

Billy and Michael strolled through groups of industrious people. A couple of associates were talking excitedly together in front of a computer screen. They looked up, smiled enthusiastically, and then went back to their task, as Billy and Michael walked by.

“Let me ask you something,” Billy said. “When you finish flattening an organization by eliminating jobs, outsourcing services, and cutting out middle layers of management, what kind of a situation are you left with?”

“Well . . . ,” Michael said slowly. He started counting on the fingers of one hand. “You’ve got upper management closer to where the action is. You’ve got supervisors with a wider span of control. And you’ve got resentful people who have been trained to carry out decisions made by others with ‘privileged information’ who they no longer trust.”

“Exactly,” said Billy. “All you’re describing is a smaller bureaucracy with fewer layers and more negative attitudes. Decision making is still moving up the hierarchy. If we want an empowered organization, all that has to change. So the burning question becomes, What’s going to take the place of the old hierarchy in terms of decision making?”

Michael began, “It seems like it would be everyone’s responsibility now. But you can’t just have an organization of autonomous people acting in isolation from each other. Maybe we need to depend on people working together in teams. People in teams can build off each other’s specialized skills and knowledge. Yes, I’d vote for teams.”

Billy nodded. They had been standing in the midst of a bustling stream of people. Billy led the way over to a couple of chairs at a table on the edge of the work area. Then he handed Michael a small card, the third one Michael had received:

THE THIRD KEY
Replace hierarchical thinking with self-managed teams.

“Replace is a harsh word. I don’t know how you can do that!” exclaimed Michael.

Billy responded, “Before the change, we’d had participative management and work teams. But they had always been in the context of the traditional hierarchy—mostly one-way communication, with decisions being handed down the line from the top. At best, the teams made recommendations; the managers made the decisions.”

“But we realized we were faced with new competition. In our leaner organization we had to stay close and responsive to the customer yet still maintain internal controls that would protect our financial interests. The old hierarchy, and especially the accompanying hierarchical thinking, was too slow and cumbersome to accomplish that. And, as you implied, a team of empowered people is far more powerful than a disconnected set of individuals. So the solution was to get teams to do much of what the management hierarchy had done in the past. Our people had to learn to work in self-directed teams and to make and implement their decisions. Even at the lowest level, people began to grapple with the kinds of responsibilities that had always before been left to managers.”

“What’s a self-managed team?” Michael asked.

“It’s a unique kind of team. It consists of a group of employees with responsibility for an entire process or product. They plan, perform, and manage the work from start to finish.”

“Does the team have a manager?”

“There may be a manager on a team,” explained Billy. “But, if it’s a high-performing, self-managed, empowered team, you’d never be able to pick that person out. Everyone shares equally in the responsibilities. They might rotate team leadership, but the group would decide how.”

“That must have been quite a change!” exclaimed Michael.

“It happened right here,” said Billy as he looked around. “The people you see in this department have become part of high-performing, self-managed teams.”

“You say that very proudly,” Michael said.

“The mission of our department is an important one,” Billy said. “We’re really the sensing arm of the organization and the problem-solving arm for the customer. We’re concerned with anything that goes wrong in the company’s effort to serve customers, both external and internal customers. When an error occurs, we immediately gather all the information about it. Then we feed that information to our inventory and billing operations so that they understand what’s been done wrong and can correct it for the future.”

“Sounds like a big responsibility,” said Michael.

“It is,” agreed Billy. “On the other hand, it’s not too large when viewed as a team effort. No one person has to do it alone. In fact, we who are on customer service teams can’t even do it by ourselves. It’s the whole organization’s responsibility to provide good customer service. Our teams just lead the effort. The point you need to realize is that as teams we are constantly functioning the way only managers did in the past—assessing information from all over the company, analyzing that information, deciding what to do about it, and relaying our decisions to others.”

“Hmm,” said Michael. “I can see that people aren’t sitting around waiting to be told what to do next. I’ve been watching your associates as we’ve been talking. They obviously count on each other, but everybody acts like a manager. In a hierarchical operation, people just do their assigned jobs; they don’t go out of their way to help someone else. But here, everyone who comes by looks at me and smiles. I can sense their high energy and enthusiasm. They act committed— like it’s their company.”

“Right, but you’ve got to realize that it hasn’t always been that way,” said Billy, smiling. “In the beginning, my colleagues and I were—well, let’s just say we were not immediately committed to this team idea. Many of us thought the idea of being a self-managed team sounded good, but we had no experience or understanding of how it would work.”

“That’s where the people are in my company,”

Michael said. “I have all these wonderful ideas from the past two days to bring to them about empowerment and building self-managed teams, but they probably haven’t a clue about how to begin to operate in this new way.

Michael paused and then added, “It’s like wanting something to function freely by itself, but in order for it to do that you have to give it a push.”

“That’s a very good way of talking about the paradox you experience in the beginning, before people are empowered,” Billy remarked. “You can’t just stand around hoping they’ll take over. You have to start by giving them what they need at the place where they are. In our case, the managers had to begin with a rather directive style of leadership. They had to tell and show people how to begin acting more empowered.”

“I’ve been getting that message,” said Michael. “It seems that moving to autonomy begins with the need for boundaries and direction.”

“Right,” said Billy. “Guidelines and structure are essential in the beginning of the empowerment journey. People think directive behavior is telling people how to do their jobs, but our managers put the emphasis on telling us how to manage our jobs.

“It was exciting to suddenly be charged with using all the job knowledge we’d accumulated as a group. Almost everyone had ideas about how we could improve our service and responsiveness to our customers. But we didn’t know how to make decisions as a team. We lacked team skills—skills for solving problems, managing meetings, managing the team, and handling conflict.”

“So your managers focused their directive leadership not on telling you what to do but on developing the skills that were going to enable you to function on your own as a team.”

“Right.”

Michael had been summarizing in his organizer again. He showed Billy what he had written:

Empowerment comes from teaching others things they can do to become less dependent on you.

“That beautifully captures the idea for the starting point in training teams,” responded Billy. “It was a lesson managers throughout our company had to learn the hard way.

“In the beginning, they thought the idea was to leave self-managed teams alone. So they abdicated their roles as coaches and then wondered why teams floundered. Everyone on our team was excited at first. But that lasted only for about a week. Then came denial—nobody wanted to admit we were totally confused. We did not want to recognize the widespread dissatisfaction.”

“So what happened?” asked Michael. “Obviously things got straightened out.”

“What happened was that Sandy recognized the state of chaos we were in. She called us all together to help diagnose the trouble. She took the blame for the confusion and never pointed a finger at anyone else. That showed us that management was on our side.

“In the meeting we realized that we wanted to be empowered but that we lacked many of the necessary skills. Together we concluded that we needed training in how to become a self-managed team. We needed training to teach us how to make decisions as a team, how to resolve conflicts as a team, how to monitor group participation and involvement, and how to share team leadership, among other things. We also realized that we needed some relatively strong leadership to guide and direct us as we worked to become self-managed teams. And we needed careful monitoring of our progress.”

“In effect, you were asking managers to direct you,” said Michael. “And it sounds like your managers began with a strong directive style, which is still confusing, given that the goal was to become empowered. I assume that to become empowered, sooner or later they had to stop using that style with you. Remember, you said when you become a high-performing team, you can’t tell who the leader is. How did the team get away from the need for the directive leadership?”

“Slowly. Gradually. Almost imperceptibly at first,” responded Billy. “Then faster. We began to hear stories of people and teams acting in empowered ways. Teams began to do things that only managers had done in the past, and do them better. Our managers began to act like facilitators and coaches. Some of them started to be masters at choosing just the right moment to do what we call ‘standing there.’”

“What’s that?”

“It’s actually a critical skill of managing to empower. You have to know when to follow the rule”:

Don’t just do something— stand there.

“You mean knowing when not to step in so that somebody else can act?” asked Michael.

“Yes. The managers became adept at gradually transferring more and more responsibilities to the teams. The managers’ fears dissipated as they found they were not losing control and that there was still plenty for them to do. They became more involved in strategic planning, working more with customers, looking at new equipment and procedures, researching and delivering the kind of training people will need in the future, as well as special company projects that had been on the back burner.”

“There seems to be a delicate balance to this matter of transferring,” Michael ventured.

“It’s a dance,” said Billy. “Like dancing, though, once you get the hang of it, you trust your intuition. In empowering people and teams, you learn new ways of assessing people. The best part is watching employees become associates. It’s a lot of fun to ‘lead’ them occasionally to just a little bit more responsibility than they think they can handle. Then when it turns out you were right and they do handle it, it’s great to see the pride in their faces!”

Michael paused, thought for a moment, and said, “You know, this team thing—correction, this empowered-team thing—can really be powerful. It’s like a basketball team or a volleyball team that plays really well together. The team members’ skills are transferable but also unique. They are given a chance to utilize their abilities and to continue to grow and develop. As individuals, they have the chance to become all that they can be and, at the same time, they’re helping the organization become all that it can possibly be.”

“It sounds like you’ve got it,” said Billy.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Michael, “but to make sure, why don’t you take a look at this?” He handed his organizer over to Billy:

Replace Hierarchical Thinking with Self-Managed Teams

• Empowered teams can do more than empowered individuals
• People don’t start out knowing how to work in self-managed teams
• Dissatisfaction is a natural step in the process
• Everyone has to be trained in team skills
• Commitment and support have to come from the top
• Teams with information and skills can replace the old hierarchical thinking

“You’re right on the money,” said Billy with a smile.

“You’re a good teacher,” insisted Michael.

After Michael thanked Billy, he headed home. As he drove, Michael could not stop thinking about what he had learned. One burning question that he wished he could answer kept coming to the surface. Finally, it got to him. He picked up the car phone and dialed Sandy Fitzwilliam’s number.

“I wondered when I would hear from you again,” she said.

“May I come by to talk with you right now?” Michael asked.

“Of course. I’ll be waiting.”