This week’s blog post will cover what I find to be an interesting subject: self-managed teams. While I have heard of the self-managed team concept, I was never formally educated about the subject nor felt I had any experience with them. As a matter of fact, I struggled with understanding the term at first because it sounds quite contradictory or an oxymoron. I have always worked in organizations with a traditional hierarchy, so a few of my initial questions were “how does a team manage itself? Is a supervisor or manager involved in any capacity? Are self-managed teams more effective than traditional teams?”
After researching I found that I wasn’t alone in thinking a self-managed team sounds like a contradiction with Paul Tesluk (INSEAD, 2008), Associate Professor of Management and Organisation at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, stating “it is a contradiction, in some ways it is a bit of a paradox of how do you lead teams to lead themselves”. Tesluk (2008) goes on to describe a self-managed team as having formal responsibility and authority to make their own decisions on how they are going to accomplish their tasks instead of a supervisor. I also learned that there are pros and cons to using self-managed teams. For example, Brown (2011) suggests that some drawbacks associated with using these teams include: the task, people, and context may not require a self-managed work team, managers and leaders do not understand their roles, self-managed teams may lack proper training, and organizations lacking rewards for performance can create problems. On the other hand, creating self-managed work teams can bring benefits to an organization. The self-managed team concept is still considered a fairly new practice despite many organizations having already implemented these teams for years. Therefore, it is difficult to find quantifiable data to support the benefits, but the practice is finally gaining traction because competitors are realizing the value self-managed teams can provide. Brown (2011) suggests that “some companies know that self-managed work teams are having a positive effect on earnings and are not inclined to pass along their techniques to competitors” (p. 353). Chuck Blakeman, founder of Crankset Group, agrees that self-managed teams are the future, are time-tested, proven, and here to stay. He posits that these team team members take more ownership in their decisions, the team most affected by their decisions will be better at making it vs. a single manager, and “these companies grow faster, are more productive and more profitable, have lower turnover, and have increased longevity” (Blakeman, 2014, para. 7).
Personally, I would love to work on a self-managed work team. I am currently working within a traditionally structured organization and team, but I think my position has similar characteristics to a self-managed team. Our supervisor identifies goals for us to accomplish, yet he does not tell us how to get them done, that is up to us. So, we have a lot of freedom to determine what we feel are the best routes or methods in task achievement. Being part of a self-managed work team would be a natural fit for me and I have no doubt I would be highly motivated to perform. Furthermore, I think I would also perform well as an external manager of a self-managed team, but not without honing some skills first. The primary area I would focus on is knowing when and when not to get involved with the team. Tesluk (2008) refers to this as the authority balance beam in which “you have to walk that carefully and delicately and use careful judgement as when to intervene and when to back off” (INSEAD). I would also focus on improving my coaching skills since my primary function would be to coach the team on how to run meetings, teach self-management and communication techniques, and encourage them to take ownership in their decisions.
References
Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Blakeman, C. (2014). Why self-managed teams are the future of business. Retrieved from https://www.inc.com/chuck-blakeman/why-self-managed-teams-are-the-future-of-business.html
INSEAD. (2008, September 22). Self-managing teams: debunking the leadership paradox [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/GBnR00qgGgM
No comments:
Post a Comment