Self-Managed Teams and Culture Shifts

The field of socio-technic systems work redesign emerged in England at the Tavistock Institute in the 1960s. Eric Trist and Fred Emery discovered that coal miners had developed an unusual work arrangement: they preferred to mine coal as self-managed cross-functional teams. Upper management tried to organize them into conventional structures of specialization and hierarchical supervision, but their productivity and morale plummeted. When they were allowed to work again as a team, they regained their very high quality output.

Trist and Emery thought there might be something in that work pattern that could be generalized and applied in other settings. Out of that investigation came the understanding that there is an intrinsic interdependence between the way work arrangements are structured and the way people feel and act toward the work and toward each other--that a change in the technical work system affects the social work system, and vice-versa. Looking for descriptive terminology for this they came up with "socio-technic systems (STS)." They developed ways to design new work arrangements, or to redesign old ones, guided by these discoveries. Most often--though not always--the redesign process led to self-managed teams that included all the skills and resources needed to complete a whole job from beginning to end.

The increases in productivity and work spirit in a range of organizations where this was implemented during the next two decades were astounding. In a world that was beginning to experience accelerated change, technological innovation, and globalized competition, these self-managed teams had a superior ability to adapt and innovate, and to move up any learning curve quickly. And they showed an amazing intrinsic motivation to do so. They didn't need a supervisor to tell them to improve the work--they had an interest in doing it themselves and did it quite well. In fact, supervisors tended to get in the way.

The emerging realization was that there is a fundamental clash of cultures between these two ways of structuring work. Emery distilled the difference in terms of a Design Principle I, referring to the conventionally vertical coordination of work through hierarchy, and a Design Principle II, referring to the horizontal coordination and self-regulation of self-managed teams. Part of the difference, too, was the shift from organizing departments according to function--marketing, fabrication, R&D, etc. (what we now refer to as silos), toward the inclusion in any team of all the skills required by the job--they were not only self-managed teams, they were cross-functional self-managed teams. The classic example is the redesign of the Volvo assembly line, so that instead of each individual attaching the same part to each car moving by on the assembly line, a team of assemblers traveled with the car from beginning to end, putting the whole car together. At the end, they expressed their pride in the quality of their work by engraving all their names on the engine block.

But the shift from Design Principle I to II is not a simple one. It affects technology, organization, supervision, reward systems, assumptions, and interaction skills. Supervisors, especially, can feel threatened because their role seems to become redundant. It takes an appropriate amount of time, planning, training, and coaching support to implement this shift successfully. At an oil extraction plant in Canada where I was part of the consulting team guiding this shift, the staff of the Utilities Division (that produced all the electricity, steam and processed water for the mine) was released from work for one week per month for six months to carry out the planning and training needed to make the shift (yes, temporary workers were hired during this time). At a Motorala cell-phone assembly plant in Florida, teams went through several phases of change, in which supervisors first became participative leaders, then coaches, then on-call consultants.

The tragic error among some managers who learn about the benefits of self-managing teams is to try to implement them by memo--to decree the end-result structure while skipping the participative analysis of all work processes, the appropriate tailoring of the new work design to their core work situation, the necessary investment in training and support, and the time people need to integrate a fundamentally different work culture. In the end, the effort therefore fails, and work structures revert to the old ways--problematic but familiar.

But properly implemented, especially by engaging people appropriately in the redesign of their own work processes, STS can lead an organization toward surprising improvements in both work effectiveness and teamwork.

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