Forster N. - Maximum performance (2005)(en)

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4This principle applies equally to companies that may have contracted out their personnel recruitment to an external agency. However, there can be risks with this (see, for example, Peter Drucker’s 2002 article on outsourcing in the bibliography at the end of this book).

5‘Work smarter – not harder’ is another old idea that came of age in the 1990s. It was first suggested by Allan F. Morgensen, the creator of ‘Work Simplification’, in the early 1930s.

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Nissan and Toyota. The growth in team working that later followed was driven by other factors, such as the need for western companies to become faster and more nimble in the marketplace, the need to improve product quality and reliability, the technological revolution in production processes, and the need for continuous improvements in customer service provision. In the USA, corporate giants such as Motorola, General Electric, Procter and Gamble and General Motors were amongst the first companies to introduce team-based manufacturing processes in the 1970s. The ‘fashion’ for teams has spread rapidly ever since, with team-based manufacturing now being used in more than 90 per cent of all manufacturing plants in the USA (Kaye, 1997). The drive to delayer and flatten organizational structures in the 1980s (and strip out layers of middle managers in the process) was also instrumental in the push to introduce team-based manufacturing and production systems.

This era marked the introduction of self-managing work and project teams, and the emergence of cross-functional work teams in many organizations. For example, Hewlett-Packard was one of the first companies in the USA to routinely mix together specialists in single teams. These brought together engineers, technicians, marketing managers, lawyers, sales people, purchasing specialists and shop-floor workers, in order to discuss all facets of their innovation and production processes, and the marketing and selling of new products. Internationally, there are growing numbers of transnational project teams, such as those that worked on the Channel tunnel in the 1980s, and those currently working on transport systems and other largescale building projects in East Asia, such as the Three-Gorge dam in China. Today, ‘self-managing teams’, ‘team work’, ‘quality teams’, ‘cross-functional teams’, ‘team players’ and ‘virtual teams’ are common features of many organizations.

Worldwide, employees in most organizations now work as part of a team of some kind. Team working is now so prevalent in organizations that one could be forgiven for thinking that this way of working is perfectly natural. In reality, simply putting a disparate group of people together and calling them ‘a team’ does not guarantee success and, as a result, some teams do not work well together. Furthermore, the emergence of team-based working also has a profound impact on traditional management control and authority, a fact that some companies have yet to come to terms with. For example, one survey of chief executives by Price-Waterhouse-Coopers indicated that, while 83 per cent believed that team working was essential for the future success of their organizations, 54 per cent had experienced ‘significant frustrations’ in making teamwork a reality. The biggest obstacle to change was

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reported to be ‘the unwillingness of senior managers to give up power and control’ (cited by Uren, 1998b).

On the one hand, teams hold out the promise of sharing knowledge and creating solutions to problems, improving work processes and communication, enhancing individual motivation and productivity, cutting costs and promoting innovation. It has also been suggested that teams, not individuals, are now the fundamental learning units of the modern organization; unless the team can learn, the organization cannot learn (Senge, 1990). On the other hand, the reality of team working can be interpersonal conflict, political infighting, backstabbing, groupthink, social loafing, freeloading and passing the buck. Teams can also be directionless, clueless and motionless if they are not well managed, and ‘team work’ may just become a feel-good mechanism that gets in the way of achieving anything. Organizations continue to throw people together, tell them they are ‘a team’ and then hope for miracles. A Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon in 2000 summed up this scenario, when Dilbert’s evil boss tells his employees that he is going to reorganize them into ‘fast moving teams’. Their response is, ‘Good plan. We’ll never realise we’re powerless, micro-managed serfs after we call ourselves “a team” ’. Hence, as with other facets of leadership and people management, teams can only succeed if the appropriate structures and processes are put in place to support them. As the Australian Graduate School of Management’s Roger Collins once observed, ‘You don’t get an Olympic team being thrown together and told to work. Instead, they spend years and years training to get it right. That’s what companies should be doing’ (cited by Ferguson, 1999). Consequently, simply introducing ‘teamwork’ into an organization will not automatically make people work smarter and faster, or more collaboratively and productively.

Do team-based work systems benefit organizations? The short answer to this question is ‘Yes’, but only if they are introduced and managed in the right way, and if the working practices and culture of the larger organization of which they are a part support them in their work activities. For example, some form of team working is used in all of the ‘Visionary Companies’ described by Collins and Porras (1996) and the ‘Good to Great’ companies discussed in Collins (2001). O’Reilly and Pfeffer also make these summary comments about team working in the successful US companies they surveyed:

the people-centered companies we have described rely heavily on teambased systems. Examples include the total team-based approach of Applied Energy Services, the formal systems at New United Motor Manufacturing and Southwest Airlines, and the informal teams at Cisco Systems, the SAS Institute and the Men’s Wearhouse. This emphasis on teams as an organising

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principle derives not from a current fad, but from a belief in the fundamental importance of teams as a way of both getting the work done and of promoting personal responsibility and autonomy and of tapping the ideas and energy of everyone. Teams, in spite of their difficulties, can promote a sense of purpose and give people a sense of belonging. At New United Motor Manufacturing and Applied Energy Services, teams take responsibility for the production process. Supervisors aren’t in control. Teams are. Instead of relying on formal monitoring and control systems, teams rely on the social control of others to ensure that people behave consistently with the norms and values of the companies they work for.

(Abridged from O’Reilly and Pfeffer, 2000: 242)

Since the pioneering Hawthorne Studies of the 1930s there have been hundreds of studies on teams and work groups, conducted in North America, Europe and Australasia. Many of these have shown impressive results for organizations that have moved to team-based work systems. For example, one of the largest studies of team working, in the Fortune 1000 companies, found that involvement in work teams had a strong positive relationship with several key dimensions of employee and organizational effectiveness, with 75 per cent reporting improvements in these two areas. Other reported improvements in this study included ‘more participatory management styles’ (78 per cent); ‘better management decision making’ (69 per cent); ‘more trust in management’ (66 per cent); ‘easier implementation of new technology’ (60 per cent) and ‘improved health and safety’ (48 per cent). The reported benefits to these organizations included ‘better quality of products and services’ (70 per cent); ‘more customer satisfaction’ (67 per cent); ‘improved employee quality of work-life’ (63 per cent); ‘greater productivity’ (61 per cent) and ‘improved profitability’ (45 per cent) (Lawler et al., 1992). In general terms, this study found that organizations that used teams reported above-average individual and organizational effectiveness when compared to organizations that were not using teams. Similar results have been reported in a range of studies that have looked at self-directed and self-managed teams. For example, Near and Weckler (1990) reported that employees working in selfdirected teams scored significantly higher on measures such as task significance, employee involvement, information sharing and innovation, when compared to employees in traditional work structures. Many other studies have produced similar results (for example, Ancona and Caldwell, 1992; Hackman, 1990).

The positive and negative aspects of team working in organizations

We were forming a group of people who’d be working together and learning together, going through similar experiences and creating something new together. I thought it was terrific.

(Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek Memories, 1994)

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The benefits of teamwork and effective work teams have been known for more than 30 years:

•Teams that are working effectively always produce more ideas and information than individuals working alone. In turn, this should result in improved decision making, by highlighting and offsetting the personal biases and selective perceptions of team members.

•Teams can improve motivation and performance, by giving employees more autonomy and control over their jobs. They can also provide socio-emotional support for newcomers to an organization and a sense of security. Almost everyone is more energized and laughs more when in the company of other people.

•Teams can increase efficiency by eliminating layers of management whose traditional job was to pass down orders from the top. Selfmanagement in teams frees leaders from traditional command-and- control responsibilities and gives them more time to concentrate on the creative and visionary aspects of their jobs.

•Teams can enable a company to draw on the skills and imaginations of people working cooperatively. Teams may allow people to perform multiple tasks and can foster greater cross-functional collaboration across internal organizational boundaries.

•Learning, of any kind, is far more effective in groups. Peer pressures can enhance self-learning and skill acquisition amongst individual team members.

•Creative brainstorming is only possible in teams, and this can lead to new ideas, breakthrough thinking, innovations and quality improvements.

•Cohesive teams generate good teamwork, high levels of team spirit, mutual respect and trust and a willingness to make sacrifices for one another.

•People working in teams may have greater confidence in communicating back up an organizational hierarchy (‘safety in numbers’), if they disagree with decisions being made by senior management.

•Individual members of a team can benefit from team-based pay and group productivity bonuses.

•Teams can help in managing change, and introducing new working practices into organizations (see Chapter 8).

When a team of employees becomes totally unified in its individual and collective endeavours, the whole can become greater than the sum of its individual parts. In a sporting context, there are many, many examples where this phenomenon generates collective performances that exceed the abilities of the individual members of a team. The most successful teams in business and sporting contexts are those that have

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learnt another extremely important lesson: the interests of the team always come before the interests of individuals, no matter how gifted they might be (Parkin et al., 1999: 23–25).

Are there any limits to the use of teams? Can we find places or circumstances where a team structure does not make sense? Answer: No, not as far as I can determine. That’s unequivocal and meant to be. Some situations may seem to lend themselves more to team-based management than others. Nonetheless, I observe that the power of the team is so great that it is often wise to violate apparent common-sense and force a team-structure on almost anything.

(Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos, 1987)

Peters is largely correct, but teams are not a panacea for every organization, all employees and all work tasks. For example, simple or routine jobs may not require team-based solutions. It may also be inadvisable to ‘force’ team-working practices onto employees without developing the skills and competencies that they will need to succeed in these new environments. There can also be a number of negative aspects to team working:

•A reduction in employee motivation and performance, if good individual performers are punished as a result of belonging to a team that is not performing well. High performers may also be unfairly penalized after joining a pre-existing team that is carrying weaker or lazier employees.

•Teams can become ineffective ‘waffle-shops’ and slow down decision making, particularly in large bureaucracies. This tendency is captured in the well-known old saying, ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee’.

•Social loafing (laziness) and freeloading (enjoying the benefits of, or taking credit for, other people’s work) may occur amongst some members of large teams.

•Teams can be coercive and intimidating, and there may be overdependence on a dominant leader

The potential for ‘Groupthink’ is a widespread phenomenon in organizations, whereby collective delusions of grandeur and infallibility replace true reality testing within a team or group of employees. The most often cited examples of this include President Kennedy and the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1987, and the failure of all companies who become complacent or arrogant about their past record of commercial success. More recent examples of the latter phenomenon include the boards of Enron, Worldcom, Xerox, Cisco, Arthur Andersen, Lucent Technologies, AT&T, Polaroid, HIH, UMP, Ansett, One.Tel and many other companies that have either gone out of business or suffered a major decline in

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their fortunes in recent times. There are four main causes of this phenomenon (adapted from Janis, 1972):

1The emergence of a dominant leader, who believes that he is infallible, does not attempt to provide impartial leadership, and who demands that people follow him at all costs and obey all his decisions.

2The emergence of an in-group of favourites that values unthinking obedience to the leader and excludes dissenters. At board level, this can also be characterized by the emergence of self-appointed ‘mindguards’, who decide what information is received by the in-group and who also control access to the inner-circle and the leader. This can also be accompanied by a phenomenon the psychologist Jerry Harvey has called the ‘Abilene Paradox’, when individuals in groups make decisions they know to be stupid or irresponsible because they know they can avoid responsibility for them.

3Insularity from the outside world and the emergence of a strong feeling of ‘us and them’ (‘we’ being superior, right and good, ‘they’ being inferior, wrong and bad).

4A sense of impending crisis, creating time pressures, a distorted sense of reality and poorer decision-making processes.

When a group of employees belongs to a dysfunctional team they can never be united in their individual or collective endeavours, the team becomes far less than the sum of its individual parts and, sooner or later, some kind of crisis will emerge.

Leading effective work teams

Team leadership skills

With these thoughts in mind, how can one ensure that the teams we lead and manage operate successfully? Before this question is addressed, please complete the next self-development exercise.

Exercise 5.1

In Chapters 1, 3 and 4, we identified a variety of leadership and managerial skills that can and should be applied in team settings. Please write down as many of these as you can remember, before reading the next paragraph.

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The skills that can be applied in team settings include being honest, walking the talk, supporting your employees, setting a positive example, active listening, winning over and persuading an audience, storytelling, humour and two-way communication, as well as the variety of motivational and empowerment techniques that we looked at in Chapter 3 (in particular goal setting and providing positive feedback and rewards). To these we now need to add some additional skills and techniques.

It has often been said that there is no ‘I’ in ‘team’ and, more than anywhere else, this is a situation where the leader becomes something identified in Chapter 1: first amongst equals. This is because an autocratic management style tends to inhibit team self-leadership, thus defeating the whole point of having self-managing teams in the first place. A participative leadership style can facilitate team empowerment, because it teaches self-leadership skills and also helps the team learn how to coordinate itself. Active leadership is only beneficial for teams that are in the early stages of development (see ‘Creating a new work team’, below). In fact, some teams can be very effective with several leaders or with a system of rotating leadership. One example of a very successful team that did not have a formal stand-alone leader was the 2000 Olympic gold medal-winning hockey team, The Hockeyroos. Their innovative coach, Rick Charlesworth, abandoned the idea of a single team captain and instead set up a system of captain, vice-captains and co-vice-captains, believing that every member of his first team was capable of taking on specific leadership roles. He also argued that the system of promoting some players and not others created social loafers, both on and off the pitch (Le Grand, 2000). Another example is the organization of the teams that fly on the Space Shuttle missions. While there is a mission captain, leadership roles are quite fluid and are determined by the particular tasks that the flight is dealing with at any one moment in time. In fact, ‘dominant personalities’ rarely make it past the selection and recruitment stage of the astro- naut-training programme at NASA (Maruyama, 1990).

The essence of an effective crew member is how much they are willing to put their individual egos in the equipment locker and work totally, mind, body and soul, for the duration of the mission. We have enough talented individuals to run a hundred Shuttle flights, but we only ever have a handful of people who have what it takes to work as part of a highly integrated and professional unit in space.

(Attributed to Stephan Mayer, NASA Flight Crew Training Officer, 1993)

Does this mean that teams don’t need leaders? In most organizational situations they do, but in team-settings the leader does not have to be the noisiest or most dominant participant. Leadership in teams is a more subtle art, requiring the leader to act more like a puppet master, the conductor of an orchestra or first amongst equals. Leadership in

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teams is not about bossiness, or being ‘tough’, ‘dynamic’, ‘hard’ or ‘decisive’, because simply riding roughshod over the ideas, contributions and feelings of others in a group can be very counterproductive. As we saw in Chapter 4, this means that leaders have to be willing to give their leadership away to their followers, and allow them the freedom to take greater responsibility for the decisions they make and the work they do. Hence the key to effective team leadership is to find ways of unleashing the potential and talents of the people you have in your team, not telling them what to do. If you involve people in this process, they will usually be on your side and come to regard you as their ‘natural’ leader, coach and mentor. If they are on your side, they will follow you willingly down the ways, roads or paths that you want them to go down. This means that team leaders have to be able to deal with three overlapping aspects of team management, often at the same time: supporting and developing the individual, growing the team and achieving work tasks and objectives.

What I really wanted in the organization was a group of responsible, interdependent workers, similar to a flock of geese. I could see the geese flying in their ‘V’ formation, the leadership changing frequently, with different geese taking the lead. I saw every goose being responsible for getting itself to wherever the gaggle was going, changing roles whenever necessary, alternating as a leader, follower or scout. And, when the task changed, the geese would be responsible for changing the structure of the group, similar to the geese that fly in a ‘V’, but land in waves. I could see each goose become a leader.

(James Belasco and Ralph Stayer, The Flight of the Buffalo, 1993)

Group size and composition

Is there an optimum group size? Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. This depends on what the team’s purpose is and the nature, duration and complexity of the tasks it is dealing with. Small groups tend to be better at dealing with tasks quickly, while larger groups are better at problem solving and generating new ideas. However, research on this question indicates that the optimum team size, in most situations, is six to eight, with seven employees being the ideal number (Shaw, 1981). While larger teams have more resources, skills, ideas and abilities to draw upon, and more people to whom tasks can be delegated, the following can occur as teams increase in size (Albanese and Van Fleet, 1985; Shaw, 1981):

•less participation, because the time for individual contributions is reduced. In turn, this can lead to a reduced willingness to listen to other individuals in the team;

•a greater probability of sub-groups forming within the team;

•a greater potential for individual differences, interpersonal conflict and political infighting to occur;