Empowered Teams

Companies fear empowered teams. Employee empowerment represents the end of management as we have known it. That cannot happen too soon for me.

I have been privileged to have worked in an empowered team. Without a full-time "official" manager, they were self-managed. Proponents of the corporate management hierarchy might fear anarchy. Instead, this team was democratically run. They were independent, innovative, professional, and accountable; they shared responsibility and ownership. They got things done.

Being a part of an empowered team is a heady experience. Once you've experienced that, you want it again.

The team still exists, but it's "under new management". In other words, there's a "real" full-time manager now and he's taken charge in the way of all managers. There's hope, however, if not for us, for others.

Lynne Waldera: What we found in our study was that companies that have soft and fuzzy behaviors -- making all employees feel like owners and feel connected to the company's vision and values -- were growing at 141%. The companies without these behaviors were growing at 10%. Those "nice things" ultimately produce dramatically different economic impacts.
...
Here is an alternative to middle management -- intranet technology. Some of the best companies we looked at are using their intranets to funnel information to employees and to enable employees to make decisions. Those companies with the strongest intranets have the flattest organizations. In response to that observation, somebody said to me, "That's obvious because middle managers suck at delivering information. They just aren't good at it. They never did it before. Why should we think we can train them and get them to do it now? Why not allow all this information into the flow of employees' daily lives so they can access it?"
...
Laurie Coots: In a study of how corporate culture gets in the way of companies changing themselves, we saw that managers are not trained to understand how to lead groups of highly empowered, self-reliant employees. However, a digital dashboard that shows employees how much gas is in the tank, how fast they're going, and what's happening in real time fundamentally and dynamically changes their behavior and their tolerance with their supervisors not being superhuman and not having all the answers.

The Care and Feeding of Talent, FastCompany.

Darcy Wilson : I would agree with most points made in this great article. And I would add one of my own, from participating in the current climate of my corporation. As we`ve become more and more accustomed to using teamwork, I`ve begun to observe that too many of us are associating "teamwork" with "meetings." I.e., good teams establish a charter, publish agendas and minutes, make efficient use of meeting time. Therefore, those folks who don`t like meetings don`t like being on teams. But effective teamwork goes much, much deeper than meeting as a group. It`s up to the leader and the individual contributors to instill trust and community at all times (perhaps 24x7). This means communicating anytime, being fearless, working one-on-one, and being prepared to pick up the reins at a moment`s notice.

One of many Reader Comments

I don't advocate the total removal of the management positions. However, I do think we need to rethink their role in the company (and give it a new title). Instead of "managers" ( supervisor, boss, superior...) we need leaders, ambassadors, coaches, and representatives.

Empowered teams don't need to be "managed". They don't need a watchdog to tell them what to do and how to do it. They need a leader who can clear obstacles out of their way so they can do what they already understand needs to be done.

We tend to use the word team fairly loosely in the business world, calling any group of people assigned to work together a "team". But many of these groups just don't seem like teams. They don't have a common definition of success or any identifiable team spirit. Something is missing. What is missing is a phenomenon we call jell.
...
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The production of such a team is greater than that of the same people working in unjelled form. Just as important, the enjoyment that people derive from their work is greater than what you'd expect given the nature of the work itself.
...
Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. The team can become almost unstoppable, a juggernaut for success. Managing these juggernaut teams is a real pleasure. You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of their way, clearing the path so that bystanders don't get trampled underfoot ... They don't need to be managed in a traditional sense, and they certainly don't need to be motivated. They've got momentum.

excerpt from Peopleware, 2nd ed, Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister

Someday, I hope to belong to an empowered, self-managed, jelled team again. I look forward to a brave new corporate world that has learned how to replace "managers" with leaders.