Laura,
You asked about how one goes about creating effective (open, learning)
teams. I have some ideas and a couple of references. I also admit I'm
not describing how one creates a team in a strict hierarchical
environment. I haven't done that, nor have I thought in depth about it.
As has been mentioned before, look at "The Wisdom of Teams" by Katzenbach
and Smith. Their focus on the business imperative is crucial. Also, I
like Argyris' article "Empowerment: The Emperor's New Clothes" in the
May-June 1998 HBR (pp. 98-105). (Actually, I find most of what Arygris
has written to be very helpful.)
So, where does one start? I think one starts with a need. Presuming
you're working in a business environment, you have to have a business need
to get something done, and people have to understand its true importance
(this is no time to exaggerate the need to create artificial urgency ---
honesty is a part of openness and learning).
The next step is to reflect on oneself. Think about what you want and
why. Argyris makes the ethical point that one cannot create an open team
with closed (i.e., coercive) methods. That was, for me, an extremely hard
point to understand, and yet I believe it was crucial. I could understand
the ethics behind the statement, but I couldn't translate it into action.
("How could I carry out my responsibilities if I couldn't persuade people
to do what I wanted _without_ using an edict?") It was only by focusing
incessantly on balancing advocacy (for my goals and ideas) and inquiry
(into the others ideas) that I came to begin to understand what that meant
in practice.
A corollary to that ethical point is that it is important that you, change
agent or team manager/leader, must be wrong some of the time, and that
must be an acceptable topic of dialog. If this is to become an open,
learning environment, then it is essential that the validity of ideas and
not the position of people determine what wins debates. If you always
win, you will not create that team, nor will you get the benefits of the
skills the others bring.
You can't satisfy your need to be wrong occasionally by intentionally
injecting bad decisions into the process to be found by the other team
members. They will discover quickly that you
don't respect them enough to allow them to find their own fault to pick,
believe you are too smart to make mistakes and must inject artificial
ones, and
are probably only willing to be wrong in areas of your own choosing.
The message you need to give is that
everyone needs to contribute to their fullest, and
it is okay to expose your reasoning processes to the scrutiny of the
group, and
it is okay to be wrong, even if you thought your idea was very good.
In my experience, there were plenty of cases for me to be wrong without
trying. :-)
Next, you need to think about your role in this effort. I found myself
most effective as coach and reflector of what was happening. For that, I
helped encourage the team to be responsible for running their meetings and
process, so I could spend more time observing their actions and looking to
call out what I saw as counterproductive behavior.
I firmly believe many of the performance problems we see are not genetic
but signs of needed learning. In particular, I found that the group I was
working with had some (common) communications difficulties. Following
Argyris' lead, I used short coaching moments (like a coach calls a brief
time-out) to teach them useful techniques, to help them apply those
techniques, or simply to question what they were doing. (The most useful
tool, perhaps, was that old stand-by, the ladder of inference.) Teaching
them these things and walking them through the techniques the first few
times was very helpful in showing them a way out of apparent impasses.
Of course, the ethical point above is very relevant here. I had to be
open to the possibility that someone else on the team would disagree with
my ideas in such a time-out, and I had to be open to discussing the idea
on its merits rather than just telling them to do it my way 'cause I was
the manager. Finally, I had to recognize that it was likely that I was
the one contributing to some of the problems and that I might be the one
who had to change to improve the situation. (Oh yes, and still related to
that ethical point: I realized that I couldn't "change" anyone but
myself, anyway. The only way to get different behaviors out of the group
was to change my behaviors in ways that were _likely_ to encourage others
to change in ways conducive to meeting our business needs.)
Lest it sound like that ethical point is a touchy-feely concept not
connected to the business world, let me tie it to the real-world business
benefit we got from that. In most (all?) organizations, the manager makes
mistakes in judgment from time to time. In my experience, often there are
a number of people in the meeting who see the mistake but don't mention
it. They may be trying to honor the manager by avoiding public
embarrassment; they may be afraid to cross the manager. In either case,
the best that often comes from such a situation is that the people who
understood the mistake spend some time after the meeting making sure they
are right. Then they spend time figuring out how to sell the manager that
he may have been wrong. If they do get time to meet with him _and_ they
do convince him that he was wrong, then some time gets spent designing how
to introduce the change in direction without losing too much face. In the
best case, it may be days or weeks before that mistake in judgment is
corrected. (The worst case is that they never tell the manager.)
In the group I was working with, the entire team came to understand that I
would be far less embarrassed by having my potential errors pointed out
publicly than by having a bad decision or judgment uncorrected for days or
weeks. The group's responsibility was to correct errors as soon as they
recognized them and could formulate a response. If I made the error and
my boss (or his boss or his boss' boss ...) were in the room, that was
okay. It was still far better to resolve the issue promptly than to risk
sending part of the organization down the wrong path. This common value
tends to shorten the time to correct errors in judgment from days or weeks
to minutes.
Once it was clear that this was acceptable behavior towards me, then the
rest of the team began to find it acceptable to behave towards each other
that way.
Obviously, Agryris' approach was a key part of what I've done, but it
wasn't easy to pick up. I found I learned best by reading lots of
transcriptions of his interventions, which you can do in many of his
books. I'd even reread good examples before team meetings to help raise
my sensitivity towards contradictions he could see quickly and I but
slowly.
Another good reference for learning that approach is
http://www.well.com/user/dooley/aldpap.html. Finally,
http://www.strategy-business.com/thoughtleaders/98109/ relates the approach
to the business need quite well.
What else is handy to know? I'm intrigued by Fred Emery's participative
design (see http://www.nmsu.edu/~iirm/articles/cabana2.html). In
particular, he claims that the two critical questions in the design of
effective organizations are:
"What decisions about control and coordination of work were necessary for
effective group working?
"To what extent can these decisions be located within the group doing the
work?"
I'm also intrigued by work out of the University of St. Gallen on their
integrated management model. They divide management areas of interest
into three levels (normative, strategic, and operative) and three domains
(organization and structure, activities and programs, and behaviors and
culture). They maintain that everyone has some responsibility in each of
the nine areas of this three by three matrix; the levels of management
interest are not correlated to levels of management in the organization.
Finally, I find that the approaches of action research
(http://www.scu.edu/au/schools/sawd/areol/areol-home.html) to be very
helpful in learning and improving what I am doing. They encourage me to
respond to the reality as it unfolds rather than to approach the situation
with a rigid plan that doesn't accomodate the unfolding reality.
I hope this helps and that it wasn't too long-winded. This is just an
excerpt from my way of fostering effective teams; there are certainly
other approaches, some of which may work better.
Regards,
Your LOP Bill
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