A635.7.3.RB - INSEAD Reflection

A635.7.3.RB - INSEAD Reflection

Self-managed teams are autonomous work groups whose members decide how to handle their task. (Brown, 2011) These teams are often made up of people from different specialties and are brought together to solve a specific problem. Work teams are assigned a wide range of tasks including, scheduling, budgeting, assigning jobs, developing performance goals, and selecting team members. (Brown, 2011) The benefits of having a diverse makeup within the team are to bypass any bureaucratic issues they may come up against while trying to work through the different aspects of their project. It allows the team to move seamlessly through the project steps because they have tentacles in each major department required.

Our text goes over the drawbacks of a self-managed team and mentions that some of the work teams might not be appropriate to the task, people, and context. There are also roadblocks to a self-managed team when the organization doesn’t see the need for change, or when managers and leaders are vague about their roles regarding the self-managed teams, organizations that do not reward performance will run into problems, a lack of training can cause self-managed teams to fail, and building a self-managed work team is not a one-shot activity. (Brown, 2011)  

I would love to work within such a team – as long as it was appropriate to the tasks and that the team was made up of the right people for the job. I love the idea of an autonomous team that is high functioning and trusted by leadership to bring results. I haven’t seen a lot of that at Boeing but I think if I was part of the R&D teams it would make more sense for those tasks. It also makes sense to have self-managed mechanical teams who order their own parts, schedule their work, and utilize their own standard work to get their section of the airplane built. I see that some of the strongest teams get broken up because of management decisions to randomly move people around. When you have a strong team that knows what it’s doing and understands the work they are doing intimately, it’s dangerous to disrupt that brain trust by taking someone out or adding someone new, or both.  In supply chain, a self-managed team might make sense if we were given total autonomy to purchase and receive parts but I also know that there needs to be a checks and balance to who can purchase and who can receive in parts.  

To be an effective external manager of a self-managed team, or support team, you would need to be able to work in ambiguous situations. You would need to be a facilitator, energizer, teacher, and encourage the team’s self-managing behaviors, learning, goal setting, creativity, self-evaluation, peer-to-peer feedback, and group problem solving techniques. (Brown, 2011) The ability to break down roadblocks for your self-managed team would be essential. They wouldn’t need you to settle disputes or to approve decisions, but they will need an advocate and someone who can proactively see potential roadblocks and move them before they disrupt the momentum of the team.

 

References:

Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

INSEAD (2008). Paul Tesluk - Self-managing teams: debunking the leadership paradox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBnR00qgGgM