A631.4.4.RB - INSEAD Reflection

According to Paul Tesluk, Associate Professor of Management and Organization at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, "Self-managing teams are not as rare a phenomenon as what they used to be. By definition, a self-managing team is a team that has formal responsibility and authority for making their own decisions about how they organize their work and how they decide on how they're going to get their work done." Tesluk also includes that instead of having a formal supervisor with that responsibility, "it's up to the team to decide how they structure themselves and how they go about organizing their work flow and process." Self-managing teams can be found especially in flatter organization structures where teams are focused to be more independent. However, some type of leadership still needs to be in place. This type of leadership is different from that of the traditional team with a leader at the top. Tesluk states, "the leadership style within a self-managing team is far less directive, but more inspirational and visionary." "Here the leader develops team capabilities to be able to make decisions, understands how to best organize and structure team workflow, and figures out how to manage roles and responsibilities." To get to this advanced stage, an element of team formation is required and the importance of finding an effective leader is emphasized. (Self-managing teams: debunking the leadership paradox by INSEAD (YouTube), 2008) Tesluk states leaders have to balance the "authority balance beam act" for self-managing teams. "You have to walk that carefully and delicately, and use careful judgment as to when to intervene and when to back off and allow the team ... even to make some mistakes that they can learn from and continue to develop." He emphasizes self-managing teams are not for every organization. This structure works best in teams that have high levels of knowledge, skills, abilities and expertise within them along with the ability to organize their own work. It would be counterproductive to have a supervisor tell the team how to go about doing things, develop a strategy, manage budgets, analyze performance data, learn from mistakes and improve as a team. The team would be able to do that themselves including developing guiding operating principles of how the team will operate, function and interact. Supervisors must be able to provide the latitude for the team itself to decide about how to best do its work. There would be several examples of when it would be appropriate and required for a supervisor to step in and intervene: emergency situation and major interruption, bottleneck and constraint to workflow such as a production assembly line stoppage. (Self-managing teams: debunking the leadership paradox by INSEAD (YouTube), 2008) In my present position as an industrial engineer at Boeing, I am the "captain" of our self-directed high performance team. Several years ago we started our journey to greatness and matured progressed from formation, development, collaboration and now to self-directed. We are an autonomous, empowered and engaged operating team and have our own team charter with guiding operating principles of how we run and operate as a team. We set our own team goals including metrics, training and back-up process for coverage and have daily team huddles. Our manager is a coach and usually only intervenes gets involved if there is a "people personnel issue" or high level strategic issue. He does not micromanage or control the team. Self-directed means there is less management control and more empowerment. In addition, we mentor other lower level teams and participate in corporate citizenship community events including Books & Backpacks. Our biggest team strength is enhanced performance (team synergy) and being a role model for other teams and leadership. References Brown, Donald R. (2011). An Experiential Approach to Organization Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc. Self-managing teams: debunking the leadership paradox by INSEAD (YouTube) (2008). Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBnR00qgGgM