WITHDRAWN Creating Leadership in Self-Managing Teams. Easier Said Than Done

• In Event: Lead Away, But Don't Mislead Me!

Short Description

In direct response to a more turbulent business environment a European Sales and Manufacturing organization attempted to shift from hierarchical command-and-control to flatter, self-managing teams. The resulting principles and lessons learned are contrasted with common advice from the OD literature on learning organizations and self-managing teams.

Detailed Abstract

Distributing authority and leadership to form self-managing teams as a response to a turbulent environment is receiving wide attention in the academic (see e.g. Raelin 2003; Pearce and Conger 2003; Wassenaar and Pearce) and in a range of practitioner literature. Senge (2006) proposes that an organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition will be the driver to sustain long-term competitive advantage. Innovative implementations of learning organizations have been advanced in manufacturing originated especially by Toyota and its lean production system (Liker 2004) and software development with SCRUM teams (Sutherland 2013). Other practitioner in facilitation have developed extensive methods to distribute authority and create collective leadership in temporary, facilitated settings (e.g. Baldwin and Linnea 2010 for the Circle Way Method or Scharmer 2016 with Theory U process).

Even though the increasingly turbulent business environment increases the call and rationale for more responsibility, adaptability and engagement with employees the practical challenges in bringing participatory, distributed or adaptive leadership practices to organizations are far from trivial and require more attention. In particular one issue has gotten insufficient coverage: the conflicts arising when implementing self-managing authority and leadership principles and practices in predominantly hierarchical organizational settings.

As Ed Schein's model of organizational culture (Schein 2010) points out their are invisible and unconscious beliefs present that have significant effect on more visible processes and behaviors. The visible changes that one hopes to introduce with practices around collective leadership and self-managing teams will inevitably clash with the old routines and beliefs about how to work in hierarchy. The period of co-existence of new practices and principles and unconscious old system beliefs is critical and benefits from more detailed understanding.

To illustrate these challenges this presentation will show the experiences of the past 3 years made trying to bring such practices to a European B2B Sales and Manufacturing Organization from the vantage point of an external facilitator and OD consultant. The circumstances of several independent national sales organizations of various sizes and histories have provided naturally diverse settings for experimentation and comparison. In some units easy uptake and progress was made while in other unforeseen resistances have been particularly illuminating the hidden effects of decades of command-and-control mindset, behavior and processes.

We found that shifting units with long traditions of working in hierarchy have found it most challenging to adopt self-managing team practices. We found that four topics in particular need attention by OD consultants and managers alike:

First, addressing the dependency on formal authority for direction, decisions, order and conflict resolution; this requires a set of new principles and practices for taking up joint responsibility. Also addressing emotional aspects of fear and self-awareness and dialogue with the group and the managers with formal authority are critical elements to be discussed.

Second, striking the proper balance between giving responsibility for self-organization and still using authority to guide and keep the transition on track; a key danger is to under-lead here and provide too much responsibility too early.

Third, the active support and handling of holders of formal authority and the way in which they need to build trust as newly dependable authorities.

Fourth, key role of change agents who have experienced and can support the adoption and practicing of new management and leadership practices.

We hope to provide a richer understanding and some principles and practices for OD consultants, senior executives and managers alike on the challenging path to generate collective leadership within their own organizations.

Participant

• Alper Tengz, Learning Architect