ALLOW TEAMS TO BECOME SELF-MANAGED

MICHAEL WAS excited to meet with Luis Gomez and learn more about self-managed teams. Luis greeted him with a firm handshake.

Luis began, “So it’s my job to show you more about how teams become the hierarchy. Actually, that’s my favorite subject. Probably the fact that I’m team leader this quarter has something to do with it.”

“Did top management give you some rules that govern your team’s operation?” asked Michael.

“We operate with very few rules from the top,” Luis answered. “In fact, we have only four basic rules, and these were actually developed with all employees involved in a process led by Sandy and her management team. The four rules that guide all our actions are

• Keep customers first and foremost in our actions.
• Look after the company’s financial interests.
• Be flexible in making quality decisions.
• Keep others in the company informed.”

“But,” Michael said, “I’ve just finished learning from Elizabeth that new rules and boundaries are essential for getting to empowerment.”

“That’s right, but they’re essential mainly at the beginning of the process,” Luis said. “We’ve come a long way on our journey to get where we are today. We started with a lot of external structure and rules. But now those rules come from within our team. Let me tell you how that happened.”

“Good,” said Michael.

“More than a year ago when we began our journey,” Luis said, “Sandy told us that her goal was not only to flatten the organizational pyramid but to turn it upside down for operating decisions.”

“What did she mean by ‘turn the pyramid upside down for operating decisions’?” asked Michael.

“Suppose you have two phones on your desk, one red and one blue,” said Luis. “The red phone is a direct line to the chairman of the board. The blue phone is a direct line to customers. Both phones start ringing at the same time. Which do you answer first?”

Michael paused, then said, “Well, the red phone, of course!”

“Right. And that,” said Luis, “is the problem with most organizations. The pyramid is inverted only when it’s safe for you to answer the blue phone first.”

“I happen to know that your company has gone through a de-layering like we did. But merely reducing the number of management layers does little to change the fundamental way that work gets done in a corporation.

“Without taking some specific steps such as those you’ve been learning about here, it remains a typical, vertical organization. People continue to look up to their bosses instead of out to customers. Their loyalty is still to the functional fiefdoms in which they work rather than to the overall company and its goals.”

“Exactly,” Michael replied emphatically, thinking of his own company.

Luis continued, “When people are empowered they don’t look up the hierarchy for answers; they take responsibility to solve problems where they occur.”

“How did your people respond to this new responsibility?” asked Michael.

“At first, when people began to realize that they had more responsibility, many of them acted like they didn’t want it. There were feelings left over from the old days when the attitude was ‘That’s not my job.’ I remember hearing people say, ‘If we’re gonna be bosses, we should be getting more pay.’ Handling this resistance to change was one of the things we had to learn. It was critical to our empowerment efforts.”

“What was the first thing you did to help change attitudes?” Michael asked.

“Sandy kept preaching the belief that decisions had to be made at the lowest level of the organization— that is, at the front line.”

“Don’t you mean ‘at the highest level of the organization when the pyramid is inverted’?”

“Good catch,” laughed Luis. “For people to take on the responsibility for these important decisions, they were going to need new skills and different ways to operate. In short, they had to learn to act in responsible, decision-making teams.”

“How did people take to that?”

“They were confused. On the one hand it sounded good, but they didn’t know what it meant. Neither did the managers. Everyone became discouraged and confused about what to do next, because they had never done this before, either. It was a very frustrating period of time for everyone. It became clear you could not just announce empowerment and expect it to magically occur.”

“That’s what I’ve done,” said Michael, reflecting on the recent happenings at his company. “How did you pull out of this mess? Before I came to see Sandy and all of you, I was ready to throw in the towel and give up.”

“We almost gave up ourselves,” said Luis, “but then two things happened. First, Sandy didn’t give up. She just persisted and kept talking to us as if we were all managers. A simple example is the asking memo she began to use.”

“Asking memo?”

“You know how it goes in the typical unempowered organization: A memo comes down from on high saying we all need to start to save electricity or paper or some darn thing, and people stand around and look at each other, smile, and say, ‘R-i-i-i-ght.’ Then the manager comes out of his or her office and starts giving out orders about how it’s to be done. Everybody feels like a naughty kid getting a lecture.”

“That sounds like what I’ve seen, and done, all my life,” sighed Michael.”

“That’s a telling memo,” nodded Luis. “An asking memo is different. Take the case of the problem of saving resources. Sandy’s memo would start out with the pertinent cost information, broken down to include the department’s portion of the problem. The language of the memo would be short and sweet—no pep talk like, ‘Let’s all get behind this effort.’ It would be written simply, as if the readers needed this information so they could make decisions about it. When people in our department received one of those early asking memos from Sandy, they looked at each other and then read the memo again. It was obvious that a departmental decision had to be made.

“It was just as obvious that no one was going to make it for us,” Luis continued. “Pretty soon a dialogue would start. People would suggest things they could do. Then they’d decide what they would do.”

“Early version of a team meeting,” Michael put in. “How about carrying out the decision?”

“A snap,” replied Luis. “Since the group had dealt with the problem on its own, the group ‘owned’ the solution. You know the way it is whenever you have a joint agreement with somebody. You both feel willing to carry it out and also to tell the other person if he or she goofs.”

Michael nodded. “But I’m wondering about something. As you were developing these self-managed teams, what was the function of the managers?”

“That leads into the second thing that helped pull us through a period of high dissatisfaction and discouragement— training! Managers knew they should be behaving differently and so did their team members, but nobody had a clue what to do until Sandy required us all to go to team skills training.”

“Required you to go to training?” echoed Michael.

“Yes,” said Luis. “Sandy sees training not as an option but as a value. She made team skills training a requirement for everybody. She said that once you’re scheduled for training, you cannot cancel it for any reason other than for a personal emergency. She said if we were ever tempted to pull someone from training, we should call her, and she’d work the person’s shift.”

Luis excused himself for a moment to respond to a question from a teammate.

Michael wondered what Luis meant by required training. He thought about how training had worked in his organization and in other organizations he’d seen. People were scheduled for training, then were pulled out by supervisors because of some bureaucratic crisis—the vice president was making a visit, or more people were needed to take inventory. Sandy Fitzwilliam was obviously a leader committed to training as a way to bring about needed change.

When Luis returned, Michael asked him how many requests Sandy got to work people’s shifts.

“Not one,” Luis answered. “When top managers are squarely behind the training of teams, it really smoothes the way. Remember the second step to empowerment?”

“Clear boundaries lead to empowerment,” said Michael. “I see. But what about all the dissatisfaction and discouragement you said people were experiencing? How did they work through it?”

“It took a while,” said Luis. “In our training we learned that groups, like individuals, go through predictable stages of development. They need different kinds of leadership at each stage.”

“Tell me more about the group stages,” Michael said, once again getting out his organizer.

“When a group first forms, members are typically enthusiastic, but they don’t know how they’re going to operate or who’s going to play what role. That’s called the orientation stage, and it’s a time when a team needs strong, clear leadership. Someone has to set the agendas and organize the team’s efforts.

“We didn’t do that initially, and our teams quickly moved into the second stage of development, the dissatisfaction stage. The reality of working as a team always seems to be more difficult than team members expect. In the training sessions, we learned that teams in dissatisfaction need continued strong, clear leadership. But they also need support—someone to listen to their concerns and cheerlead for any progress made. We learned that, while this dissatisfaction stage is uncomfortable, it’s a critical stage for ultimately becoming a self-managing team. It was in this dissatisfaction stage that we began to experiment with a role we still use today called the ‘team coordinator.’”

Michael said, “We use team leaders in my company, but I have an idea you mean something a little different.”

Luis nodded and said, “During the initial stages of our teams, the team coordinator, in many ways, acts like a manager. After a team moves into resolution— the third stage of team development, when members begin to learn to work together—we start to rotate the role of team coordinator among team members. The role of the coordinator is to support and facilitate the team.

“Also, it’s important that team members understand what’s going on in other areas,” continued Luis. “So the coordinator attends weekly meetings of other departments and reports back to the team. This process supports one of the organization’s key values— cross-training and cross-utilization. Most of the decisions are made as a team, but the coordinator does the detail part, handling most of the paper work, scheduling people for vacation time, and so forth.

“The coordinator also trains the next person in rotation. We found that the team coordinator role becomes less critical as the final production stage of development is reached. A self-managed team acts to direct and support individual efforts itself. Again and again we learned the value of diversity as a real asset for dealing with the complex problems we face today. And when I talk about diversity, I’m not just talking about race and sex but also cultural background, as well as diversity of abilities, skills, and opinions. We found that by drawing upon the unique skills, perspectives and knowledge of our team members, we developed far better solutions to our problems.”

“So as people’s capabilities and contributions increase, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts,” Michael summarized. “But I know that dealing with diversity can be difficult. It’s much easier if everyone thinks alike. Haven’t there ever been times when your teams just blew it?”

“Oh, sure,” replied Luis. “Many times teams have learned the hard way. They’ve failed to utilize their resources and explore differences of opinion and tried to railroad decisions through.”

“What happened?”

“It backfired. Next time the team had to decide something, those members whose ideas were ignored were uncooperative.”

“So team development really involves using a lot of human relations skills.”

“Absolutely. Any time we’re to make a decision on a complex matter, we have to make sure each person has an opportunity to express his or her opinions and concerns. We do this not only to be fair but so that each individual’s talents can be brought to bear on the problem.”

“When a team has reached the production stage, what is it able to do?” asked Michael.

“Over the last year or so, our teams have used a discussion series titled Power Up for Team Results to provide follow-up to the training and to guide us through the stages of becoming empowered teams. Gradually, we have taken on the responsibility for more and more important decisions. A number of teams are now at a point where they actually do all or many of the functions traditionally viewed as the job of management— such as hiring and disciplining, performance evaluations, allocation of resources, quality assurance. These teams have really replaced the old management hierarchy.”

“Amazing!” exclaimed Michael. He shook his head thoughtfully.

“What’s wrong?” asked Luis.

“Several times today I’ve been faced with the evidence that empowerment really works, but it challenges my old beliefs.”

“Hey, join the club,” laughed Luis. “Most managers would say that if you trust people to be responsible for performing these functions and monitoring themselves, you’re just asking for trouble. Maybe that would have been true of individuals the way they were accustomed to being treated under the old command-and-control management model. But when you empower people with information and boundaries and then train them to operate in self-managed teams, it’s different.

“Since we committed ourselves to empowerment, I’ve come to see that the people in our company were a vastly underutilized resource. When they understand that you’re trusting them to use their brains and their abilities, their own sense of responsibility kicks in. It’s as if they’ve just been waiting for a chance to view the organization as their own, so they could improve it. Combine this intelligence and energy with a shared commitment to serving the customer, and you’ve got something really powerful!

“What’s more,” Luis continued, “we keep getting better and better, and people continue to grow and develop new skills and abilities.”

“In fact, if people are not continuing to grow and develop, then we find that they just don’t seem to fit here anymore, and they wind up leaving. As long as people want to continue to grow, continue to develop, and continue to stretch themselves, they have a place here—they really fit. And that means we wind up having an organization that is profitable in many ways.

“I’ve developed a list of all the benefits of self-managed teams”:

Benefits of Self-Managed Teams

• Increased job satisfaction
• Attitude change from “have to” to “want to”
• Greater employee commitment
• Better communication between employees and management
• More efficient decision-making process
• Improved quality
• Reduced operating costs
• More profitable organization

“And for all those payoffs to occur,” replied Michael, “your self-managed teams need to have a great deal of information. Now I understand further why information sharing is the first key to empowerment.”

“You’re absolutely right. And the need for information sharing continues to grow,” explained Luis. “We have had to develop better mechanisms for recording information and for making it available to more people. One of the beauties of today’s computer technology is that it allows us to put information into a form that’s readily available to everyone through our company network. Everybody knows what’s going on all the time. You see, for teams to be responsible, they demand a tremendous amount of information, more than they’ve ever had.

“We’ve also found as we’ve operated,” Luis continued, “that our team members are asking for only the information that’s really useful to them. That keeps us from being inundated with requests for information that they’ll never use.

“That means we don’t have to prepare as many reports as before, but the reports we do prepare convey important information to our teams. Since teams are thinking about the importance of what they do, they’re continually looking for better ways to do things and more ways to utilize the skills and abilities they have. After all, this is their organization, isn’t it?”

“Fascinating,” said Michael. “I’m finally getting a handle on how empowerment works and the impact it can have on organizational performance.”

“Great! I’m glad I could help,” smiled Luis.

Michael thanked Luis and headed out thinking, I’ll stop by Sandy’s office and see if she has any final words of wisdom before I start my real and enlightened journey to the Land of Empowerment.