The Transition to Self Managing Teams

Self managing teams: describing the future

Describing the desired future for self managing teams is complex because it typically goes beyond prevailing management or work paradigms. It requires the creation and sharing of some kind of vision for how the organisation will operate. 

Leadership capability also has to keep this vision open and powerful to identify and avoid obstacles. These will need to be overcome if the vision is to be achieved, without actually destroying it.

These are difficulties in describing the future. How to overcome them?

Two descriptions follow for how organizations have created pictures of the future state. These approaches involve people and help them understand the process they will be involved in - and indeed, to some extent, shape.

Self managing teams: leading the transition

In our experience, the role of managers is one of the most under estimated levers in successfully implementing self managing teams in the workplace.

The development of managers is often left as a last consideration, or is totally ignored.  This is a fundamental organisational flaw because creating self managing teams involves a power shift from managers to the teams.

Unless managers are taken care of first, there will be concerted resistance. This can reach the point where the change process will be sabotaged or subverted by myriad conscious and unconscious actions.

For success and effectiveness, managers must become an active and positive force for change. First, they will need to let go of their traditional sources of power. Have you prepared for this?

Managers are likely to be used to getting information first; deciding who has access to it; making decisions; controlling; knowing best; applying rules and procedures and so on.

They also develop higher level sources of power.  These include coaching, training, delegating, managing processes, managing boundaries, working from principles and values.

This development process to help managers lead change and take on new management styles cannot be achieved by just developing more 'doing' skills.

The managers' transition: from 'doing' to 'being'

Change in management appproach - and change in managers - is a critical issue in the transition to self managing teams.

Most management development, after all, focuses on 'doing'.

The majority of managers have to make a paradigm shift in order to change behaviours that have been encouraged and rewarded, often for as long as 30 years in some organizations.  This cannot be achieved easily.

The need to develop 'being' skills has been long recognised, but cannot really be learnt and applied like budgeting or forecasting.

Emotional IQ, or EQ

More light is shed on the concept of 'being' in the books of Daniel Goleman.

In Emotional Intelligence - and many more on the subject - he demonstrates that IQ is very poor preparation for the 'turmoil, or opportunities, that life's vicissitudes bring'.

Goleman argues that a greater predictor of social competence, personal effectiveness, self-assertion and coping with frustration is emotional intelligence.

He cites the work of Peter Salovey at Yale who defines the five basic domains of emotional intelligence as:

• Knowing your emotions: an inability to notice personal emotions leaves individuals at other people's mercy.
• Self-management: people who can handle their feelings appropriately can bounce back much more quickly.
• Motivating oneself: those with a skill for delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness tend to be more highly productive and effective.
• Recognition of emotion in others: empathetic people are better managers.
• Handling relationships: managing emotions in others underpins popularity, leadership and personal effectiveness.

This definition has much in common with a model to develop managers and team members for high performance work systems we used in Procter & Gamble ... and since then, with other organizations.

Called a Continuum of Management Power and Influence, it has five elements:

1. Discovering and managing self: including managing energy, thoughts, feelings, learning, career, commitment and motivation.
2. Managing interactions with others: including self-observation, assertiveness, responsiveness, giving and receiving feedback, handling conflict, process observation and behaviour observation.
3. Managing others and teams: including coaching, peer ranking, risk-taking, problem-solving, process interventions, managing process against vision, using models and concepts.
4. Managing and leading an organisation: including working from principles and values, managing processes and context, developing culture, inspiring vision, managing resources and regeneration.
5. Assessing and redesigning organizations: including assessing the organisation, strategies, culture and performance whilst redesigning the organisation to maintain a leading edge.

Many organizations we have worked with do see the value and potential contribution of managers. They invest heavily in their development ahead of, and during, the implementation of self-managing teams.

The process often requires up to six, one-week, highly experiential workshops over a 12-24 month period.

These enable managers to become aware of how their existing beliefs and values empower or disempower themselves or others.  Opportunities are also provided for managers to choose alternative beliefs and values to raise their effectiveness.

The outcome is that they develop 'being' as well as 'doing' skills. This increases the effectiveness of their contribution. They participate more meaningfully in the design and implementation of the transition to self managing teams.

Additionally, they develop skills to influence the behaviour of others in line with the organization's needs.

Investment in the development of managers' "soft skills" and EQ is vital to creating a flexible and responsive team.

Such personal-professional development can enable managers to create and live vision and values that serve as a true basis for creating successful self managing teams.

These will fully meet the business needs as well as those of individuals, and take full advantage of the benefits that self managing teams bring to workplace.

Self managing teams: other articles of interest

If you've enjoyed our article on self managing teams, you may be interested to read the following:

Find more on the design of self managed teams in this article.

Ideas about the essential differences between work groups and work teams  are described in this article on groups v teams.

This article focuses on the differences in the leadership of team vs group leadership.