Team members jointly decide how work is undertaken Team members collaborate and support each other Teams reflect on and review the way members work together
Of course, individual jobs cannot be examined in isolation. The ability to share problems and solutions with colleagues, to learn and reflect together, to provide and receive support in challenging times, and to celebrate successes plays a vital role in well-being and performance. The key concept here is teamworking, one of the defining characteristics of workplace innovation. Extensive research demonstrates that self-managed teams empowered to plan, organise, review and improve their own work are more productive in factories, plants and offices, provide better customer service, and even save lives in places like hospitals. They also offer much better places to work.
However, the word ‘team’ is increasingly used to describe such a diverse range of workplace situations that arguably the term is in danger of becoming meaningless. While teamworking may refer to a general ‘sense of community’, or a limited enlargement of jobs to enhance flexibility, these situations are sometimes referred to as pseudo teams. Self-managed teamworking involves a radical re-appraisal of jobs, systems and procedures. Real teams are more than groups of co-located employees; they share knowledge and problems, break down barriers and demarcations, and generate ideas for improvement, innovation and growth using the insight that day-to-day work experiences give them.
Teamworking takes many forms and is always shaped by the organisation itself. We may also be members of several teams in the workplace – functional teams, project teams, professional teams, improvement teams, and so on. Yet while teamworking is manifested in so many different ways, good teams tend to demonstrate common principles.
How self-managed teams work
We need to consider two dimensions:
Team design: the composition of the team and its overall place in production or service delivery within the organisation as a whole.
Team functioning: the scope of its responsibilities and the ways in which people work together within the team.
1.2.1 Team design
It is particularly important to define the scope of each team’s remit and its relationship to other teams. Traditional organisations divide the production of manufactured goods or the delivery of services into separate functional divisions; this is to allow each team to become highly specialised and to deliver the best possible performance in its own area, an aim usually reinforced by very specific targets. Research and experience over the last seventy years has shown that such specialisation causes delay, waste and quality problems for production or service delivery as a whole through lack of shared understanding and incentives to co-operate. Employees and managers are detached from the whole product or service and can be remote from the customer, often leading to disengagement and lack of job satisfaction.
Overcoming these problems means creating multi-functional, multi-skilled teams with responsibility for a complete part of the manufacturing or service delivery process, and with a strong emphasis on skills sharing, communication, customer focus and collaborative improvement and innovation. We explore this further in the Organisational Structures and Management Element, but for now the following questions offer a useful starting point:
Can workflow be made to move more seamlessly between stages in the service or production process? A useful approach is to map the different stages and capture ‘stories’, good and bad, about whether the passage between each one is optimal in avoiding delay, waste and poor quality. This analysis can start an inclusive dialogue with those involved in each stage, a shared investigation of root causes and a participative approach to redesign based on a systemic view of service delivery or product manufacture. Read about our Mini-FabLab at DS Smith.
Can we strengthen the team’s understanding of its part in the overall system and how its actions affect other teams? Co-operation and shared problem solving are very difficult if there are strong demarcations between different skills and functional tasks. Skill sharing, ‘task sliding’ and collaborative improvement and innovation are important practices in breaking down silos.
‘What you measure is what you get’, so are we measuring the right things? A team may be meeting all its targets while contributing to waste, delay or quality problems because it is not incentivised – or allowed – to use its discretion in helping other teams or those responsible for different parts of the workflow. The focus of expectation and measurement needs to be on a team’s contribution to the process as a whole rather than on separate segments.
There can be no better way of building an effective team culture than by empowering the team to plan, schedule and organise its own work. Such self-management, when properly supported, engenders shared responsibility, trust and a spirit of collaboration.
Team meetings form the indispensable core of effective teamwork. Their precise format and frequency will vary according to the nature of each business. As an example let’s take a hypothetical team that holds daily, weekly and monthly meetings. Sounds like a horrendous waste of time? Well, not when it’s done properly . . .
Daily meetings could be quite short (‘10 @ 10’) or might stretch to 30 minutes. Standing meetings are a good way of maintaining energy levels (and of keeping the meeting short!) Meetings would take place around carefully designed visual display boards where appropriate and the agenda could include:
celebrating team successes;
reviewing any health and safety concerns;
reviewing decisions and actions agreed at the previous day’s meeting;
reviewing issues from the previous day;
allocating the day’s tasks (including covering for absence);
anticipating challenges;
sharing problems;
acknowledging individual effort.
Recording agreed actions and accountabilities on the visual display board and reviewing their progress at the next day’s meeting ensures follow-up.
These meetings may well be led by the team itself without management or supervisory involvement, rotating the chairing or facilitation between members. Outcomes would be reported to management after the meeting where necessary.
We learned from a Fresh Thinking Labs visit to the SAAB Aerospace plant at Linköping in Sweden that they include a 5 minute exercise routine on the daily team meeting agenda. As they say, why expect people to undertake heavy manual work without suitable warm-up exercises first?
Weekly meetings would have a greater emphasis on continuous improvement and forward planning, also creating an opportunity for the team to discuss company-wide initiatives and objectives. The participation of senior team members would help to close the gap between management and teams.
Monthly meetings might be quite different in style, perhaps with a focus on deeper reflection and innovation, and maybe involving other teams or departments where appropriate. Creative facilitation and a more relaxed environment would be conducive to outcomes involving fresh thinking and insights.
Meetings need to be fit for purpose in the way that they’re set up and run. They must be purposeful and never boring! Above all, they must be inclusive and based on mutual respect – so that the best argument wins, no matter who makes it.
Well-functioning team meetings, and wider communication within teams, does not happen by accident. Management must be prepared to invest in team development and coaching to ensure open and constructive communication, the avoidance of blame, and a learning and improvement culture. See, for example, the Coaching Tool developed by DS Smith Lockerbie.
Our Meeting Protocol contains some useful guidelines, and regular use of the Evaluating Meetings questionnaire will also help you to keep people engaged.
If co-operation and collaboration are a defining characteristic of real teamworking, then we would expect to find some degree of blurring between the different roles performed by individual team members. Without some measure of overlap, or at the very least a strong understanding of each other’s specialisms, the possibilities for co-operation and collaboration are very constrained.
Naturally this will mean very different things in different types of organisation. In a hospital, doctors can never do the job of midwives or vice versa, but good patient outcomes depend on sophisticated levels of communication, mutual understanding and respect, and shared problem solving (see our case study here). In contrast, the separation of skills and functions in many manufacturing or service operations is based on custom and practice rather than reason. There are still factories where an engineer drills the hole but has to wait for the electrician to feed the cables through it; or offices where the smooth flow of administration is disrupted by the breakdown of tasks into narrow silos.
Managers sometime cite the costs of multi-skilling or cross training employees as a reason for living with the inefficiencies that result from task fragmentation. Experience suggests that the costs of inaction can be much greater than those immediately apparent., not least when new competitors appear who are unencumbered by ‘custom and practice’.
At its most straightforward, teamworking means that all team members take responsibility for everything that happens within the teams area of responsibility – not just for their own machine or specialised function. For many organisations this involves major culture change, best accomplished through the active participation of prospective team members in the redesign of work practices.
How are teams led? Traditional organisations employ supervisors or chargehands whose role is to allocate work, ensure adherence to standard operating procedures and take responsibility for meeting targets. Over the years we’ve meet some interesting characters in these roles, many with a deep passion for their work and a caring, but tough, approach to the people they manage. We’ve also found numerous instances of bullying, harassment and active resistance to change from people in these positions, often appointed for their technical knowledge rather than any aptitude for leadership. There are many well-documented cases in which failure to retrain or redeploy supervisors led to the death of attempts to introduce self-managed teams: it is not enough simply to rebrand them as team leaders
Many successful self-managed teams do not have formal team leaders. Arguably, team leadership assumes the concentration of responsibility onto an individual rather than its wider distribution amongst all team members. Or does it?
Achieving distributed responsibility within a team often requires a period of coaching, helping individuals and the team as a whole acquire the skills and confidence needed for self-management. ‘Leadership’ should be redefined as a ‘co-created’ process in which many individuals take the lead in areas that reflect their particular expertise, experience or passion – and this can apply at the level of teams or (as we explain in the Co-Created Leadership & Employee Voice Element) at the level of the organisation as a whole. It achieves remarkable results when the team or organisation achieves maturity in the co-ordination and alignment of these different energies.
Coaching and mentoring skills tend to be a vital part of this mix. Team self-management should mean moving away from a supervision culture towards a coaching culture. This means providing people-oriented individuals (sometimes identified as the ‘natural leaders’ who organise social events or charity work in their own time) with the coaching skills that enable them to guide and develop their teams towards effective self-management and self-improvement.
Good teams are clear about their shared tasks, and about precisely who is part of the team. Once teams grow larger than 8-10 members it becomes difficult to maintain cohesion.
They are clear about the skills the team needs to achieve its purpose.
The team is empowered to make appropriate choices about recruitment and recognises the important of recruiting people who are good at collaboration and sharing.
Team members need to understand clearly their roles and the roles of other team members, so there is no ambiguity about who is responsible and accountable for each task.
Good teams set themselves clear, challenging and measurable objectives every year. The aim is not just to get the job done but to achieve significant improvements and innovations. Progress towards achieving these objectives forms an important part of regular team meetings.
Well-functioning teams assess and seek to improve their effectiveness in working with other teams inside (and sometimes beyond) the organisation.
Teams with a supportive, humorous and appreciative atmosphere deliver better results and their members are significantly less stressed. They are more optimistic, cohesive and have a stronger sense of their efficacy as a team.
Teams must also meet regularly and have useful discussions, enabling them to reflect on how well they work together and how to improve. Teams that regularly change ways of working are not only more productive but also more innovative than teams that do not. ‘We do not have time’ is therefore an unacceptable excuse. Such teams are also better able to respond to work pressures and adversity by innovating rather than feeling overwhelmed and helpless.
Ederfil Becker, a copper wire manufacturer in the Basque Country, is a great example of a transition to self-managed teamworking. When Pablo Mendizabal took over as General Manager he found a hierarchical organisation with several layers of management, and in which shopfloor workers were each limited to responsibility for a single machine. Pablo invested time in listening to stories of day-to-day work recounted by workers and recognised that the company’s competitive position in a very price sensitive market was being undermined by organisational distance between management and the shopfloor and by the rigidities inherent in such a specialised approach to work organisation.
Some 30 volunteers, representing a cross-section of the company’s workforce, gave up several Sundays to replan the production system from scratch. The result was an approach to teamworking where, in the words of Maider Martin (the company’s People Co-ordinator), “everyone is responsible for what happens across the whole shift, not just their own machine” – cross-training means that most shopfloor workers can undertake most functions. Each shift plans and organises production as a team in which the tasks of individual members are linked to workflow rather than specialised functions. The team then hands over to the next shift without interrupting the production flow.
Direct contact between teams and customers plays a major role in the company’s competitive success. Teams gain a better understanding of each customer’s specific requirements and are even more strongly motivated to do a good job for someone that they’ve met in person. Similarly the customer gains confidence through direct contact with the team.
Managers are only called in when complex problems arise, and only Pablo and Maider have direct line management responsibilities for the shopfloor. The majority of managers came to welcome their liberation from supervision and micromanagement, freeing them to concentrate on their technical or business development roles.
Pablo and Maider attribute the company’s remarkable growth in market share to self-managed teamworking. Of all the companies competing in this sector only Ederfil Becker maintained constant levels of production during the recession, a time when global demand fell by some 30%.
The Southern Health and Social Care Trust in Northern Ireland offers a contrasting but equally persuasive example. We led a Diagnostic exercise during which maternity staff from different professional groups reported poor levels of co-ordination and the widespread absence of a team culture. Over a period of 18 months, we worked closely with a broad cross-section of consultants, doctors, midwives, midwifery support workers (MSWs), managers, administrators, domestic staff and other professional groups to help the Maternity Service translate generic principles of Multi-Disciplinary Teamworking into an approach which reflects its specific local and clinical context. You can explore the resulting approach in our case study and film.
Forum topic: Please share an example of a team whose members really work well together to create a great service or product. What makes it special?
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Guidance for Learning Log QuestionHere we are asking you to assess how teams are currently led. What do team leaders do to ensure that teams understand how their work is aligned with the goals and objectives of the organisation?
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Guidance for Personal Reflection NoteHow would you describe the overall style of leadership in the organsiation. What do you do / could do to assess your own leadership style and how effective is it? How do you know?
We learned from a Fresh Thinking Labs visit to the SAAB Aerospace plant at Linköping in Sweden that they include a 5 minute exercise routine on the daily team meeting agenda. As they say, why expect people to undertake heavy manual work without suitable warm-up exercises first?
