Vancouver, British Columbia
May 15-17, 1996

Leading the Agile Organization

Leading Teams to Lead Themselves

Charles Manz, Professor
Arizona State University

There are two topics that I generally talk about when I give presentations on occasions like this. One is work teams, which is what I’ll primarily focus on in this session. The other is the leadership issues of empowering others, of bringing out self-leadership in others. I hope to address that in more detail in the breakout session that will follow.

To describe this idea of team work, I’d like to start by painting an image for you if I could. Maybe this is particularly appropriate considering today’s rapid pace of change and the fact that we’re not sure what the future will look like. An image of the future is to have multiple individuals, each with different backgrounds and experiences, and somehow harness their different talents and different knowledge base, bring them together, and, with appropriate team work, come up with a solution that is superior to what these individuals could accomplish separately.

I use the term self-managing work teams. In a definitional sense, these are work groups that are provided with increased decision-making autonomy and behavioral control. The groups’ members perform many traditional management functions: usually they help choose their own leaders, have regular meetings, and are even paid differently. So there are obviously a number of things that are quite distinct that begin to move the whole organization into the realm of what traditionally was management’s prerogative.

Now, some of the typical kinds of responsibilities, which vary in different kinds of settings and industries, that we see employees handling within these work teams are:

• assigning one another to jobs;
  
• coming to work and deciding who will work on what job station and rotating those different responsibilities;
  
• quality control observation and analysis;
  
• solving technical problems;
  
• resolving conflicts within the team without having to call upon someone in a higher level of authority;
  
• selecting internal team leaders, if there is a team leader— is often a rotating position;
  
• training one another, passing on each other’s knowledge;
  
• assessing their own performance, and competency testing of other members;
  
• keeping track of their hours, if there is an hourly component;
  
• adjusting the work schedule as necessary; and
  
• analysis and redesign of the work process itself.

With self-managing work teams, people apply the knowledge they have to figuring out how to do a task better and in a way that hopefully contributes to the whole.

Now, this is not always the view that is taken. Unfortunately, in some organizations the view is: Our employees want to work in teams; do we have enough harnesses? When you focus on the leadership issue, in particular, this becomes central. That’s not what we mean by team work, but sometimes that’s the way that the groups are used.

Why bother with teams? There are a number of challenges, and let’s keep in mind that, when you go to teams, it’s a major change and typically things get worse before they get better. So why bother? Why go to the trouble?

Again, the common payoff themes that I’ve observed across all different kinds of organizations include: increased productivity; improved quality; enhanced quality of work life— feel better about their jobs and appreciate the fact that their viewpoints are heard and have some impact; there can be tremendous cost reductions; turnover and absenteeism tend to decrease; and conflict is easier to resolve. It’s not so much the conflict’s reduced, in fact, in some ways it actually increases, but it’s a more constructive conflict. Instead of personalizing the differences of opinion, team members work together and eventually get to the point where they can challenge each other’s ideas and come up with better solutions. Innovation tends to increase, as does creativity and organizational adaptability. People are able to come together, combine their ideas, and adapt to changing conditions.

This is a fairly rosy picture, and it can and has occurred in a number of organizations, but not always immediately, and there are many team failures. We need to look at some of the challenges to teams, and look more specifically at some of the things that can go wrong, as well.

Where have self-managed teams been tried? I started studying work teams in the late 1970s, and at that time this was a good question. Now a better question to ask is, “Where haven’t they been tried?” They are in manufacturing and service industries, and, somewhat surprisingly, recently a growing area where I’m asked to come in and do consulting and speaking is in the health-care industry. That’s been an explosion over the past four or five years.

One difficulty is that as the use of teams continues to grow, we’re hitting the stage where people are beginning to look at them as a fad. Additionally, some individuals resent moving into teams.

Well, I’m strongly committed to the idea that empowered teams can improve competitiveness, performance, quality, productivity, and so forth. Clearly, in some organizations, they’re unfortunately being used in kind of a knee-jerk manner, copy-catting what other organizations have done without really recognizing how they fit in their own particular organization and also without looking at the preparation that is necessary in order to make teams work.

There are certainly very positive payoffs if you’re patient and if you invest in the groups with adequate training and adequate resources. But, indeed, there are problems as well. I want to emphasize again that when you first put teams into place, performance often tends to go down initially. That’s not always the case; I’ve seen some organizations where performance rises right from the beginning. More often than not, though, performance goes down. Expecting too much too soon is one of the challenges, because there’s a lengthy learning cycle and there may be an initial dip in performance.

Why does this occur? If you go into teams without preparing, without adequately planning for your own work setting, without providing any training for employees, you will certainly end up with initial performance problems.

Successful transition to self-managed teams requires new skills and new perspectives on work and management, which, in turn, requires a great deal of training, and a lot of learning. Fundamentally though, the biggest challenge to team success is in the area of management. One of the terms I like to use is the middle management “brick wall,” where much of the difficulty lies. Even if the team process is envisioned at the top, and at the lower end of the organization the employees are ready to enter into it, it is often in the middle that we encounter hurdles.

The idea that our fundamental leadership assumptions are challenged, that management’s sense of power and control is threatened, are very central to this process. Even some of the high-status workers feel like losers as they find themselves doing more menial tasks.

Let me finish with an image of the primary leadership challenge that we’re faced with. In the United States, at least, usually when we think of leadership we think of something that looks like this: We have one person we’ll call the leader who tells others what to do and they’re expected to do as they’re told. Now, many people aspire to become a leader. They want to be in that prestigious position. Unfortunately, they still have this top-down view. They haven’t made the paradigm shift, and so we end up with organizations that follow this concept of leadership— only one person rowing and the rest all giving orders. Now, if you’ve ever been that poor person on the other end, the rower, it’s not a very comfortable position in which to be.

Thank you.

Copyright © 1998 by Charles Manz