One
of the true joys of being an Army recruiter is helping our applicants realize
how the Army can be used as a stepping-stone to help them achieve their
personal and professional goals. I always ask in the interview process (because
it is a job interview so should be treated as such) what the long-term goals
are of every applicant. Of course I hear all kinds of answers. I hear people
tell me that they want to be pilots, doctors, lawyers, professional athletes –
all of the things that you would think kids might say. But the most common
answer that I hear – which also happens to be one of the most common objections
to joining – is that my applicants want to open their own business and work for
themselves without having a boss. They don’t want to be told what to do or how
to do it. Isn’t that the dream? Of course the reality is that very few of us
will go that route. It isn’t that we don’t all have the ability to do it but
the reality is that there are more opportunities with companies than there are
opportunities to make it on our own. Fortunately, there is a way to have the
best of both worlds. It is entirely possible to work for an established
organization (or a startup, too) and still live the dream of not being told
what to do all the time. The answered – self-managed teams.
A
self-managed team is “a team that has formal responsibility and authority for
making their own decisions about how they organize their work and how they
decide how they are going to get their work done” (INSEAD, 2008, 0:41).
Self-managing teams don’t have formal supervisors, at least not for the team
functions. The teams are generally comprised of experts in their field that
work together to achieve an objective (Brown, 2011). There are some minor
differences between a self-managed team and a group forming a startup or
running their own business. Those groups may be totally autonomous but a
self-managed team is still a part of a larger body. Though they may have a lot
of leeway in how they achieve their objectives, their objectives are still set
by organizational leadership. Therefore they still have an external manager –
someone that is outside of the group – that still provides a little bit of
oversight. I have never had the opportunity to work on a self-managed team
since I am in the military but I may have been on a team close to it. Back when
I was an air traffic controller, I was a watch supervisor. We had a pilot that
always sat in with us to act as a liaison between the Operations Group
Commander and the control facilities. The pilots’s title was Supervisor of
Flying or SOF. This title may have made a few of the pilots try to overstep
their bounds a few times. I remember once in Iraq I was working in a mobile
tower outside of Baghdad. We had a squadron of F-16s there and we had one SOF
that thought that he just knew and controlled everything. One evening we had
all sorts of craziness happening all over the sky. I was trying to assist my
crew in guiding in an A-10 with battle damage while also recovering a Russian
cargo plane with low fuel and an engine out. While all of that was happening,
there was also an air-evac mission that needed to get off the group immediately
plus attack helicopters trying to respond to troops in contact just a few miles
from the airfield. Oh, did I mention that we were also taking incoming rocket
and mortar fire at the same time? Then this stupid SOF stepped in and tried to
key up on MY frequency and talk to some F-16s there were about 10 minutes out
telling them that they would be cleared to land so they could get their crew
rest. I yanked his headset out of the socket, opened the door, and threw it outside.
We were, at that moment, a self-managed team and that external manager learned
the hard way that he was not an expert and his job was not to control the team.
(That seems like so long ago but I remember it so well. I still get a chuckle
out of it when I remember the look on his face! I don’t think that he had ever
had anybody dare challenge him before and here I was, this lowly Staff
Sergeant, and I threw his headset out the door in the middle of a rocket
attack! He never spoke another word to me and we never saw him in our facility
again. I should have gotten in trouble for that probably but I got away with
it.)
As
entertaining as that story may be, it actually highlights both the positive and
the negative aspects of self-managed teams. Let’s look at this from a top-down
view. “When you're an executive, it isn't easy to know the right balance of
reliability and adaptability -- and even if you do, it's hard to get an organization
to perform accordingly” (Bernstein, Bunch, Canner, & Lee, 2016, p. 40).
Self-managed teams allow leaders to somewhat “set it and forget it”. While
leadership determines objectives, they can find the best teams to achieve the
task and then take a hands-off approach. Looking at a self-managed team now
from the view of the employee, there are no limitations from bureaucracy or
politics. You are free to work with your counterparts to develop ideas and
adjust procedures as needed to achieve the overall objective. However, this
isn’t to say that there is no structure or oversight on a team. There certainly
is. However, it is primarily internal. When multiple self-managed teams are
used within a larger organization, the organization sets an overall
constitution which is in part driven by the self-managed teams but each team is
independent within the organization. Let’s look at it like a larger circle –
the organization – filled with smaller circles – self-managed teams. “So the circles
don’t just manage themselves; within those guidelines, they also design and
govern themselves. The constitution doesn’t say how people should do their
tasks. It explains in a broad-brush way how circles should form and operate”
(p. 43). Does any of this sound familiar? To me, it sounds a little like the
way our government operates. We are a unified nation yet each state operates
independently. We have a president – an external manager – that provides
oversight but the state governor still manages each state. (This is a very
loose analogy, of course, as the POTUS has a lot of control but it may help up
to understand how self-managed teams exist within an organization.) Of course,
one of the headaches with a self-managed team can be the lack of ability to
control how they operate and develop (Brown, 2011). With such little oversight
and management by a non-expert, it can be easy for the team to begin to seek
their own goals that do not align with the rest of the organization. In the
case of our nation, this led to a civil war. Obviously our nation is not
actually a self-managed team but it does well at highlighting some of the
advantages and disadvantages.
A
self-managed team can achieve organizational objections uninhibited by
bureaucracy but can easily get out of control and begin to work toward goals
that do not align with the rest of the organization. So how do we harness their
effectiveness without letting them get away from us? Consider a string quartet
as an example (Tal-Shmotkin & Gilboa, 2013). The members are highly skilled
in their trade and feed off one another. They work together to produce their
music and please the audience. However, to integrate into a larger orchestral
work, they require more than just each other. They require a steady conductor
to provide visual ques for tempo and volume. The conduct need not play one of
the instruments himself (or herself). He only need to know how to conduct. Our
approach to leadership of self-managed teams must be approached in much the
same way. We can’t try to hold back their work but we need to provide ques as
to the direction that they need to go to integrate with the organization. This
is, of course, easier said than done as it requires an established trust. One
cannot just decide to become an external manager for a self-managed team. There
must be a relationship and ultimate power must still reside outside of the team
but that power can only be used to intervene as an option of absolute last resort
lest the performance cease.
Bernstein, E., Bunch, J., Canner, N., & Lee, M.
(2016). Beyond the Holacracy Hype: The
Overwrought Claims - and Actual Promise - of the Next Generation of Self-Managed
Teams. Harvard Business Review, 94(7/8), 38-49.
Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organizational Development (8th ed.).
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
INSEAD.
(2008, September 22). Self-Managing
Teams: Debunking the Leadership Paradox [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBnR00qgGgM
Tal-Shmotkin,
M., & Gilboa, A. (2013). Do Behaviors of String Quartet Ensembles Represent
Self-Managed Teams? Team Performance
Management, 19(1), 57-71. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.libproxy.db.erau.edu/10.1108/135275913113120
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