Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 49, by Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com!JOE_PODOLSKY
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 96 11:56:17 -0800
Subject: Teams of Baby Tigers
In the February 19, 1996 issue of _Fortune_ magazine is an article titled, "Elite Teams Get the Job Done," by Kenneth Labich. The article is mainly a cheerleading piece. It's main point is that, while teams have trouble in business settings, they work well elsewhere; e.g., US Navy SEAL teams, the Dallas Cowboy offensive line, the Tokyo String Quartet, oil rig firefighters from Boots & Coots, etc. Labich says, "The notion (of teams in business) hasn't been a total bust; freewheeling, egalitarian teams have worked wonders at companies like Boeing, Volvo, Hewlett-Packard, and Federal Express. But the story is a sad one at more and more outfits that have taken up the cause. Here's how one team leader from American President Co. ... put it, 'A team is like having a baby tiger given to you for Christmas. It does a wonderful job of keeping the mice away for about 12 months, then it starts to eat your kids.'" At the end of the article, after talking about the great teams in non-corporate settings, Labich concludes, "We are talking here about teamwork at a rarefied level, a swarm of people acting as one. These folks have checked their self-interest back at the garage somewhere and moved to another zone. It's a state in which team members...create a collective ego, one that gets results unobtainable by people merely working side by side. It's all about humility, of course. Is that why (Labich asks) it's such a scarce thing in the business world?" Maybe. But, at HP, at least, I don't think that's the main problem. I recently came across another article in the September 1993 issue _Administrative Science Quarterly_. This one is written by James Barker of Marquette University and has the scary title. "Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams." Barker quotes research that describes three kinds of control: simple, direct control coming from personal or authoritarian structures; technological control which comes from the processes doing the work (e.g., assembly lines or computer-paced work); and bureaucratic control that comes from the rules that reward compliance and punish non-compliance. Max Weber, in his famous studies in 1958 saw bureaucratic control as an iron cage that becomes an "irresistible force of high rationality that would ... out of our desire for order, consume all other forms of control." Barker, however, suggests a fourth situation, concertive control, that comes from the workers themselves who collaborate to develop their own rules, rewards, and punishments. This is the kind of control that evolves within self-managed teams. Barker illustrates his findings by describing the experience of a specific company, "ISE Communications" (a disguised name), a small manufacturing company making components for the telecommunications industry. ISE was having both productivity and profitability problems, and managers decided that to go to self-managed teams as a primary survival strategy. The strategy worked. ISE pulled out of its slump, and the senior managers gave credit largely to the teams. The overall organization was flattened; teams took responsibility for full products instead of separate functions; coordination among teams was done by volunteer workers, not full time supervisors; teams set their own rules; teams disciplined themselves as needed; teams hired and fired their own members. Barker observed three phases: 1. Consolidation and value consensus. The teams went from chaos to collaboration. A loose vision came from corporate management, but the interpretation and implementation of the vision was left to each team. Team members grew to have personal responsibility to the other team members and to the products they produced. Business thrived. 2. Emergence of Normative Rules. During the first phase, rules were informal, based mainly on the relationships among the team members, but, after about a year, the teams felt the need to formalize and rationalize some of the rules. This happened mainly because of new people joining the organization, either as replacements or to increase capabilities. These new people lacked the history of phase 1 and, therefore, had to be given guidance about the expectations of the teams. Guilt and peer pressure were often used. There was no one "big brother," just lots of little ones. One new worker said, "If you're a new person here, you're going to be watched." New workers either obeyed the rules and became integrated into the system or left. There was little due-process. Rules among teams were not consistent. This phase lasted about six months. 3. Stabilization and Formalization of Rules. As more new people needed to be integrated into the organization to support ISE's success, the rules began to look more like the bureaucratic rules that existed before the teams were created. The coordination task became a full time job called a facilitator that looked a lot like pre-team supervisors' jobs. What used to be "social" rules (based on relationships) became rigidly defined in "codes of conduct." Barker says, "The work life at ISE stabilized into a concertive system that revolved around sets of rational rules, as in the old bureaucracy, but in which the authority to command obedience rested with the team members themselves...The team members had become their own masters and their own slaves." Barker concludes, "...my analysis suggests that concertive control does not free workers from Weber's iron cage of rational rules...The iron cage becomes stronger. The powerful combination of peer pressure and rational rules in the concertive system creates a new iron cage whose bars are almost invisible to the workers it incarcerates." Teams get results but at a price. Is it worth it? Are there alternatives? My sense is that we do a lot of concertive control at HP, especially in small work units, in divisions, in sales offices and in project teams. Our norms are historic as well as situational. They are described as much in folklore as in formal policies. "The work/life balance issue" merely may be a euphemism for concertive control. Maybe the baby tiger has grown up and developed an appetite. Do you agree? What stories that either support or deny these ideas can you share with us? And, if you agree that we are living this situation, what should we do about it? Joe