Many companies have kept their self-managed teams a commercial secret. Hundreds of them have tried to make them work, with mixed results. Consultants extract large foes for either recommending them or unravelling the mess from the ones that failed. Self-managed-teams (SMT) often called self-directed work teams (SDWT), have acquired a momentum all their own. More than half of the largest companies in Europe and America now have them. Such arrangements are not for the faint-hearted. They represent a switch from the boss-worker relationship to a collaborative approach.
Once the self-managed idea gets underway, everything tends to be challenged from supervision to setting wages, from existing production targets to persistent hierarchies. In principle, these apparently leaderless teams are simple to understand. You empower everyone in a team to take responsibility. Instead of a supervisor or some distracted middle manager directing events, the team runs itself. Well, that’s the theory. Now for the reality.
ESSENTIAL TECHNIQUES
- Be Committed and Practical
Creating a self-managed-team is a marathon, not a sprint. You stand a better chance of succeeding with an entirely new team than you do with a long-standing one. Managers who have introduced a self-managed principle say it’s a time-consuming business that needs careful nurturing. Self-management demands a new mind-set, one where you stop thinking in terms of managing per se and focus on empowering or motivating. If you are thinking of command and control as a management style, self-management teams are not for you.
So what exactly is a self-managed team? Broadly, it is a work group of around 5-15 people sharing responsibility for a task. It could be building an automobile or processing insurance claims. The assumption is that the members possess the skill and authority to supervise themselves. An important feature is that everyone tends to learn all the tasks required. In this it differs from the traditional team, in which jobs are broken into smaller elements, each assigned to an individual with specialist skills. When self-managed, productivity rises above conventional teams by anything from 10-20 percent. In addition, employee satisfaction increases and turnover falls.
A particular challenge that this arrangement poses especially in the western nations is the passion for independence, self-sufficiency, and competitiveness. These often come at the expense of shared goals and collaboration.
- Understand the Team Cycle.
To make self-managed teams succeed you need to know some basic principles of groups and how they reach peak performance. Whenever someone leaves or joins, in effect you have a new group. A renewed effort needs to go into rebuilding relationships, clarifying working arrangements, establishing trust, and going through some or all of the development cycle. Teams switch between various stages of development as they encounter new issues.
There are different views concerning the evolution of successful teams, but most tend to follow the same pattern. The one that is used most frequently and perhaps most clearly defines the development of teams has four stages.
- Forming – the team is a collection of individuals that are just starting to form into a single unit. The ice is carefully being broken, people are introducing themselves and are generally quiet, polite, and are getting the measure of others in the team.
- Storming – conflicts start to emerge as people display their attitudes and set boundaries. This is an inevitable phase as people get to know others in the team and find their own identity.
- Norming – norms are developed as people understand each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and patterns of behavior. The team functions as a team and tasks are accomplished. Often, teams settle at this level.
- Performing – the team starts excelling and performing at its very best. This largely results from a steady accumulation of trust, respect, and understanding, combined with a common sense of purpose and some successes.
These for stages can be added a fifth – reforming – which refers to the process of renewing and reinvigorating the team, perhaps after failures, difficulties, or major changes.
- Visit A Self-Directed Team
If you like the idea of self-directed teams, visit some existing ones to gain a practical feel for the challenges you will inevitably encounter. For example, self-management implies that no one is really in charge, when in reality this is seldom true.
- Understand And Resolve Problem Areas
Mature teams can handle responsibilities that once kept the traditional line managers in business. For example, at Dangote Industries, teams may determine members’ pay and raises based on performance appraisals. At Aquamarine Nigeria Limited, teams start by being responsible for such basic areas as material replenishment, quality at source, and on-the-job training. From there they progress to dealing with conflict resolution and scheduling vacations. Later, they may take responsibility for selecting team members, cost control, and performance appraisal. This evolution depends on some early successes, which help motivate the desire to stick with it. There are however, several issues that have to be resolved en route.
Many teams resist self-management, particularly when it is imposed by senior management. Employees, comfortable with conventional line management and having no desire to take on extra responsibility can be intransigent. It is essential to offer them clear benefits and structured education.
- Sustain Momentum
Newly created self-management teams often produce quick results. Many problems emerge later when the excitement has worn off. Now the team faces the same challenge as any long-term group. It needs to focus on creating and maintaining self-motivation or creating a list of people who are in turn responsible for continually revitalizing the team.
How long it takes before the team is truly self-managing may depend on factors outside the team’s own control; such factors influence teams no matter how they are managed.
- Allow teams to make appropriate decisions
Long-serving managers must learn to let go and trust people. They may also need to transform their style into a supportive and facilitative approach and learn to allow decisions to emerge naturally. Third, they need to respond to mistakes and crisis by turning them into genuine learning opportunities instead of using them as an excuse to punish or even grab back decision-making control.
As companies increasing rely on talent, brainwork and virtual teams that hardly even meet, self-management has many attractions. The lesson so far are that self-managed teams can be highly productive and extremely satisfying to work in. Paradoxically, though, it takes particularly good management to allow them to succeed.
FIVE MYTHS ABOUT SELF-MANAGED TEAMS
- They don’t need managers – They need managing through coaching, facilitation and other forms of support.
- They don’t need leaders – Leadership is essential and is often shared ingeniously across the group.
- They make leaders powerless – Leaders must exercise power differently and rely more on influence than authority.
- They are cheap – They cost more in the short term and have high set up costs such as training and troubleshooting.
- They are quickly established – They can take years to get right, needing constant refinement.
CONCLUSION
Self-managed teams and team-based working have developed into a normal way of structuring organizations and undertaking tasks, yet it is a difficult and complex aspect of leadership and is usually developed through experience. When developing a high-performing, self-managed team it is valuable to have understanding of:
- The benefits of team building – what it can achieved and what the leader should be striving for;
- Team roles and dynamics – how teams work towards and achieve their greatest success;
- The key stages of team development – what they are and ho to support the team in each stage;
- The features of a successful team and team leader;
- How to avoid potential problems and pitfalls.
Team building is a continuing process requiring energy, commitment, feedback, and review. Factors affecting the team change constantly, and the team need to have the leadership and support that breeds flexibility and confidence. It is often useful to consider one’s own career and reflect back to when you were in a successful team: what made it work and how it could have been better? Could your current team be improved?
