Empowered teams are the way to go

Tags

empowered teams, Learning Organizations, Team Based Organizations

A major change eCommerce has brought to business is increased transparency. It has moved the markets closer to perfect markets by making information available at a click of button. Take sites like Trivago which make price comparisons so easy and help consumer choose best option at lowest price. People can compare brands and choose the best deal. The competitive market also ensures that companies are under tremendous cost pressure and hence cannot make super normal profits. The companies have to redesign and re-work on their strategies as mentioned earlier in https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/06/21/changing-management-paradigms/.

The classical management solutions will not help companies beat markets in this new age. The companies would need better products and cost-effective operations. More importantly the companies would not be able to beat the market using their strategic advantages but will also have to rely on making use of tactical or short-term opportunities in the markets. This would call for faster decision making. Many of the decision calls may not allow sufficient time for the people in the field to wait for while the information goes up and decision comes down. This makes a case for devolution of decision making to the people in the field. Since, teams collectively take better decisions than individuals, it would be better to delegate decision making to teams.

These self-managed teams would take responsibility for their performance and take their own decisions. The responsibility of the senior managers would be to provide conditions that facilitate such decision making. Some of the enablers for empowered teams are ( please also see https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/)

• Access to information  
• Roles based teams with psychological safety
• A performance appraisal system that supports collaboration and cooperation within team members instead of rewarding for meeting requirements of the role. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/teams-and-performance-appraisal-systems/)
• Acceptance of decisions taken by the team.

We are now seeing a trend where some of the companies have adopted this. Harvard Business Review in its recent edition has carried the story “Harnessing Everyday Genius” and explains how Jean-Michel Guillon, head of personnel department and Bertrand Ballarin worked together and launched their project MAPP (Autonomous management of performance and progress) in summer of 2012 with the aim of redistributing authority and creating empowered teams.  

Some of the other companies, mentioned in HBR are

• Nucor: An American steel maker that allows operating crews to take responsibility for business development, capital planning, product innovation, process improvement etc.
• Buurtzorg: Dutch health care service provider which is organized into more than 900 self- managing teams.
• Svenska Handelsbanken:  A Swedish bank that treats each of its branches as standalone business. Branch teams take on decisions on credit, loan rates, deposits, customer communications and staffing levels.

Holacracy is another concept that operates with similar organizations. Lot of companies today are adopting Holacracy. Zappos is one of the largest companies to adopt Holacracy. Some other companies that have created self-managed teams are Morning Star, a ketchup manufacturing company and W.L. Gore, a material science company that specialises in PTFE (Teflon). The movement is now gathering critical mass and snow balling into a revolution.

Roman Empire teaches us importance of culture and values in building great companies

Tags

Building Great Companies, Democractic Organizations, Learning Organizations, Organizational Culture

Roman Empire lasted some five centuries and at its height spanned from England to most of Europe, stretching from England to Greece, North Africa, West Asia. Romans dominated Mediterranean Sea. More importantly it was known as Empire without an end, that is neither the time nor space limited it. The empire became a role model for other empires and rulers. It changed the world. For example, Britain was a geography with multiple smaller kingdoms. Each group thought the piece (of land) that they had was their own. There was no political unity until Romans brought them under one rule. There by, in a way, Roman empire created Britain.
Interestingly we do have companies that have survived five hundred years but they are not widely known. The oldest one, Kongo Gumi, was setup in Japan in 578 A.D., within 100 years of decline of Roman Empire. Studying about Roman Empire made me realise importance of culture and its contribution in making companies great. Some of the cultural aspects that companies can adopt are:
1. Cultural Integration –
a. Governance structure and rules – Everywhere in Roman Empire the governance structures and rules were the same. The rules were inscribed on the walls of public buildings so that everyone could read them. Most companies today put their policies, processes and procedures on intranet for the same reason. To be consistent, the companies ensure that policies are interpreted the same way by everyone.
b. Architecture – Whole of Roman empire had distinctive architecture- grand community buildings such as amphitheatres, baths, forums, race tracks etc. These buildings fostered a feeling of being Roman. It would not be uncommon to find these buildings even in Algeria, part of which was once part of Roman Empire. While on one hand Romans built typical Roman buildings in acquired territories, they also replicated the best of what the acquired territory had to offer to Rome.
c. Citizenship Rights – All romans had same citizenship rights irrespective of which territory they came from. Hence a slave who was granted Roman citizenship, had same rights that any other citizen of Rome had. This is also important in companies especially now that we have multi-national companies with people of different religions, regions, colour and genders. Companies make HR policies for harassment and to prevent sexist or racist comments. But these are not inclusive actions, inclusiveness is attained by giving even minorities equal voice as Romans did.
2. Core Values
a. Inclusiveness – Romans did not force the territories to adopt their lifestyle or language. They adopted and included them, e.g.
i. Religion and Gods – Romans had multiple Gods. They included gods of acquired territories within fold of their Gods. At times, even giving them joint name for example Goddess Senua (of Britain) became Goddess Minerva Senua. The relationship with God was similar across the empire.
ii. Language – Though Roman and Greek were official languages, all the acquired territories were free to use their language.
3. Decisions made on Merit and Democracy – Romans had emperor but also had senate and four assemblies and local groups. The assemblies or different bodies met at Forum; a building built through out Roman empire. Candidates were selected by citizens who were allowed to vote. This promoted a system of merit since, as mentioned aforehand, Romans had strict and very defined rules on governance. This allowed even slaves to graduate and become Roman citizens. Similarly, anyone could become an Emperor. Their emperors did not come from Rome but from Spain, North Africa, Syria, Balkans etc. The citizenship to Roman Empire had to be earned. For example, soldiers could become citizens by completing twenty-five years of service or performing exemplary act of valour in the battlefield.
4. Role of women – Women played important role in Roman society not only in trade and craftmanship but also in royal household. For example, Livia, wife of Augustus, built buildings, organized religious festivals and reached out to other women. She was not an exception and many of the emperors had influential wives, mistresses, mothers and even mothers-in law. The companies are also now increasingly being gender conscious. More and more women managers are breaking glass ceilings.
If Roman Empire was great, it was because Romans developed a culture of discipline, inclusiveness, democracy and merit. One of the reasons for decline of Roman Empire was in-fighting between Romans over religious beliefs with advent of Christianity which believed in One God instead of multiple Gods (Core beliefs and values were being questioned). Today, when the work has become complex and inter-dependencies within roles has increased, when most companies are now promoting team work, these values (of inclusiveness, promoting merit, being democratic and discipline) have become even more important. The founders have to work on it from the day one. True to the saying, ‘Rome was not built in a day’, a company’s culture too cannot be developed in a year. It is a continuous process. Any IBMer would tell you that !( https://www.ibm.com/blogs/jobs/2018/12/20/i-think-therefore-i-am-an-ibmer/).

Al Qaeda – Demonstrating team based organizations

Tags

Learning Organizations, Management of Teams, Organization Structure, Team Based Organizations

With the advent of Information Technology, the business has become very competitive. Technology has led to disruption. Today aggregators like Uber, Zomato are disrupting markets for automobiles by taking away reasons to own a car. Competitors are quick to respond to strategic initiatives making everyone fight for tactical advantages. This requires a new way of structuring organisations, working and communications. The organisations of today are competing not only with their traditional competitors but also with start-ups. They are competing not only for customers but also to retain skills and talent. They have to work at speed with inter-dependencies. They cannot afford bureaucracy. The only way they can achieve this is by developing team based organizations. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/team-based-on-organisations-a-new-organisation-structure/ )

Al Qaeda, though a terrorist organization, is a very good example of it. Organizations and management Gurus can learn from Al Qaeda on how to structure their operations and be effective.   Al Qaeda has functions similar to most corporates have. It has to raise funds, recruit zehadis (employees in another sense), induct and train its manpower, market itself and publicise its acts. Most importantly it has to carry out its work clandestinely so confidentiality is very important.

Al Qaeda, like most corporates, has a distributed structure with its operations across countries. It is continuously trying to increase its global footprint. It works across multiple languages and cultures. Its leadership is also distributed across countries. Al Qaeda is able to achieve its objectives due to its innovative structure and the fact that its recruits (or employees) are aligned with its purpose (however flawed it may be) and committed enough to lay their lives for the purpose (thanks to its recruitment, induction and training systems).

Structure of Al Qaeda

Al Qaeda is structured around teams and committees.  The leader of Al Qaeda consults and works with Shura, which means “Consultation” in Arabic. The Quran and Prophet Muhammad encourage Muslims to decide their affairs in consultation with those who will be affected by that decision. Consultation and decision making by consensus are the basic principles of democracy. Shura is committee of elders and all major decisions are taken in it.

Al Qaeda has committees for military operations, finance and information sharing. Its leaders communicate with its affiliates through these committees.  There are no hierarchical controls.  It works on system of role and responsibility and not hierarchy. An undated document, believed to have been written in the late 1980s or early 1990s, provides an extensive description of the roles and responsibilities of each of Al-Qaeda’s committees and sections. (https://www.hudson.org/research/14365-how-al-qaeda-works-the-jihadist-group-s-evolving-organizational-design).

Decision Making

Al Qaeda leaders are focussed on strategy and messaging or communications. The messages have to be consistent and aligned to strategy. The affiliates plan and execute their own operations. They do need to double check with central leadership before they carry out a large operation.

The affiliates adhere to its strategy, objectives and goals, but adopt tactical approach based on the local dynamics.

Al Qaeda is demonstrating how to operationalize key principles of team based structures:

1. Operations delegated to teams with Board focussing on Purpose, Values, Strategy and Accountability
2. Hierarchy and designations replaced by roles and responsibilities. Some roles could be more important than others.
3. Tap on to entrepreneurship of its workforce by allowing them to take initiatives, fail and learn from their mistakes.
4. Allow everyone (in team) to participate in discussions they feel are important for them. Give them a voice and a chance to shape those discussions.

We may not agree with the purpose of Al Qaeda and its acts. But we have to acknowledge that they have shown the way how the future organizations would be. That is Organizations where Boards will lay down the purpose, values and accountability structures while they would delegate operational responsibilities such as planning, implementation, monitoring and control to the teams.

Learning Organization: Structures that facilitate learning

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Human Resource Management, Learning Organizations, Organisation Structure, Strategic Management, Teams

There is an idiom in English language. “All good things must come to an end”. That is nothing great will last forever. And so it is with civilisations, countries and organizations including companies. Civilisations like Greek, Indian and Egypt have lost their status and so have countries like England, France and Germany. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman researched and put together a list of organizations that they said were excellent (Please refer to the book “In Search of Excellence”). They put together a list of companies they felt were great but by the end of 10 years, 7 out of 10 companies had lost their status. Companies like Nokia, Firestone and Toshiba which were industry leaders are now struggling to survive.

A key question that keeps on bugging us is that can we design Learning Organisations? Smart machines are machines that can think, that is they can process new data and adapt themselves based on the incoming data. Can we, human beings design organisations that change with time?

This should be feasible provided we can break “The Trap of Success”. Success is the biggest block to learning. Success reinforces our mind-sets and reinforces our beliefs. It makes us repeat what we did before in a changing environment while the competitors try new things and hence one day competitors overtake successful companies till the time, another company comes and changes the rules of the game. How can companies avoid this trap?

The key to avoiding trap of success is to keep on questioning our mind-sets especially the mental models that helped us win. We all are more comfortable with and like people who share our mental models. But this creates a trap. Its like everyone is looking in same direction and the group fails to watch its back. We all have blinders, a group with same set of blinders would fail to look at 360 degrees.

The easiest way to look at 360 degrees is by allowing a diverse group of people to challenge our mindsets. That is have teams of peers with no hierarchy so that people can challenge each other’s mindsets and the team would not only be taking optimal decisions but would also be creative or innovative. For this we need to structure an organization around teams (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/team-based-on-organisations-a-new-organisation-structure/ )

Teams allow us to develop an organisation without hierarchy and where people can question each other and challenge each other’s mindsets. This not only improves quality of decision making in the teams but also makes them more creative and innovative. Teams built around roles and without hierarchy would encourage people to take on roles of others just like in a game of football or basket- ball unlike Cricket where the captain takes all the decisions (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/). An unlikely fallout of it is increased ownership of employees, which in a competitive market is a big advantage.

We can design a learning organization by designing an organization around teams and

• building a culture where people affected by a decision or people taking a decision can participate in decision making. Decision making is by and large by consensus.
• Providing psychological safety to staff and assuring them that they would not be punished for calling out if they are affected by a decision or in a discussion, and https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/15/indian-experience-with-democracy-2/
• promoting diversity. Diversity not only in demographics but also diversity in thoughts.
• Processes that facilitate team members to cooperate and collaborate and not compete with each other.

Is that all what we need to develop learning organizations? There is more to it but then teams is a good starting point.

Maslow’s Hierarchy: Use it to shape your Organization.

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Democracy, Human Resource Management, Learning Organizations, Management paradigms, Organisation Structure, Performance Appraisal, Strategic Management, Teams

Maslow was a psychologist who proposed a hierarchy of needs. He categorised the needs as, a) physical needs that consist of need for physical well-being like food, water, clothes for protection from heat or cold and physical safety such as house, etc. b) social, psychological and emotional needs, that is, need for social recognition, inclusion, love, etc. and c) self-actualization, that is, realizing one own’s potential. Maslow believed that all human beings want to achieve self-actualization; hence move up the hierarchy of needs, and before a person could move to higher level, he has to master/satisfy his needs in lower levels. The hierarchy is shown in the figure below.

His premise was that as basic needs would be met with, the person would grow and develop social needs and finally go in for self-actualization. Subliminally he was referring to different classes in the society. A daily wage worker would be more worried about fulfilling his physical needs than social needs or self-actualisation needs as compared to a billionaire who has left all the insecurities behind him and now can work on what he actually enjoys and would help him achieve his potential. One of the examples is so many workaholic billionaires who work not because they have to earn a living but because that’s all they enjoy or find meaning in their life.

In life, every person is a discreet individual with his own needs; these needs may cut across the hierarchy (as proposed by Maslow). The priorities and needs of a person may change over a period of time depending on age, income levels and personal growth. Our behaviour and desires may express multiple needs at the same time. For example, when a person eats at a Michelin Star restaurant, is he fulfilling his physical need to eat or his esteem need or his desire to eat delicious food? Similarly, what needs does Ferrari fulfil? A person can be seen as someone with multiple needs, and these needs overlap with each other.

Every person has all the needs but the intensity of needs may change. For example, level of physical needs changes with earning levels of a person. People get used to a lifestyle and may feel insecure if lack of money may lead to decline in standards of lifestyle. The definition of what is essential or necessary changes from a person to person.

As the person grows rich or in stature, his insecurities may reduce and make him aim for self-actualization while contrary to expectations a person may also give up money for self-actualization. India has seen many spiritual Gurus, e.g. Prince Siddhartha, also known as Gautam Budh and Lord Mahavira who, though born in royal households and destined to be kings, gave up everything to find true meaning of life.
Maslow’s assumption that everyone would want to move up the need triangle is debatable and has been questioned. But for HR teams, it can be a good framework to understand profile of its personnel. It would help them in following ways:
– In designing incentive systems
– To define the profile for recruitment, but most importantly
– To shape the culture of their organisation.

Most firms design an incentive schemes that are mix of cash and recognition. For example, incentives most organisations have cash rewards, ESOPs or cash bonuses for their employees. The top performers may be additionally incentivised or rewarded with CEO’s or President’s Award, paid holiday tours abroad etc. These awards address primarily the physical and social needs. Rewards and incentives for top performers are aimed at esteem needs.

A founder who wants to develop a software development team or an ad agency that delivers high quality work, may want to hire a bunch of passionate persons and give lot of autonomy to the team(s). Same will be true for a band of scientists say who are working in basic research or cutting edge technologies. An example of it is Academic world, where most people are internally motivated and are provided lot of autonomy. They set their own targets, determine their own research and in some cases also decide on their research associates or assistants. Academic institutions are also characterised by less inter-dependency and hence allows for individual excellence. Things change in business world, where a person is expected to work with others.

Some of the ways of developing work places where employees could aim for self- actualization could be
1. Remove hygiene factors. Presence of hygiene factors, takes people away from their work. It works as a road block in cultivating ownership amongst employees. Some of the key hygiene factors are
a. Money or Salary – The discontent in salary emanates from comparisons within and outside of the company. Most employees triangulate their salary based on their personal needs, salary levels in the industry and salary levels within the company especially within their own band. A mismatch in salary that the employee expects and the company provides becomes single most important reason for disgruntlement. A salary lower than what other colleagues are getting is seen as “I am being valued less”. This affects the esteem of the employee as well. We at Srijan followed Open Salaries to minimise this discord. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/open-salaries/)
b. Democracy – Excluding people from decision making process or not being heard or grievances not being addressed is another reason for employees to feel less valued. Create an organisation where people can speak up if they have a problem or if they want to contribute. This would address the issue of hygiene factors. Create an environment where people can speak up without fear of losing job for criticising. Let them share their disagreements be it with strategy, colour of wall paper or the quality of coffee.

2. Recruitment and induction –
a. Hire passionate people-Let people come and work in the company for free for a week. See if they enjoy the work. Let them make an informed choice. Get a feedback from the colleagues on them.
b. The behaviour of people reflects their passion, their needs, their beliefs and assumptions. Most people are looking for jobs and careers but they stick to work places/ companies where most of their needs are met with. People may blame their bosses, lengthy or excessive work hours or lack of growth opportunities but the underlying cause would be unfulfilled needs or unhappiness with something. So the one week spent in office would also help colleagues understand the candidate/person. A feedback would help from the colleagues would help in understanding if the candidate would fit into the organisational culture.

3. Staff Interactions – HR/ Founders can design company in a way that allows/ facilitates interactions between staff to fulfill their social needs e.g. seating the whole team together in open work spaces without cabins and cubicles fulfils social needs such as need for inclusion. This also facilitates communication and reduces information asymmetry between team members. Structuring organisation around team would also help. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/ )

4. Allow people to experiment. Allow people to fail but do not tolerate mistakes – Most organizations are so focussed on success that they just build on their formula that made them successful. The managers and the company fail to experiment as they are afraid of failures. Let people experiment and learn. Takes failures in strides. The behavior in small and medium sized family owned companies is a good example. A father, who is grooming his child, is tolerant of Child’s failures. He would allow him to experiment and fail. But unfortunately he would not be as charitable with his employee. No wonder the son takes ownership, but the manager does not.

5. Devolve decision making to teams – One of the surest way of promoting ownership is devolve decision making. Responsibility without authority has no meaning. The senior management should devolve planning, implementation and control to lower rungs of management. This would give them autonomy and control over their operations. Teams develop their own sub-culture and help people bond, collaborate, cooperate and hence learn and grow. Essentially fulfill their social and self-actualization needs.

In a competitive world which is changing very fast, organizations need people who take pride in their work and own it. The traditional model of seeing employee costs as zero sum game is not going to be effective. HR departments will have to go beyond traditional roles and responsibilities and would have to add creating organizational culture to their job descriptions. Creating work spaces where people can achieve their full potential would be one of it.

Changing Management Paradigms

Tags

Democracy, Learning Organizations, Management paradigms, Teams

The classical tenets of Management were developed at the time of Industrial revolution. The leading management Guru was Taylor who led thinking on how to increase efficiency, reduce wastefulness and improve profits. Taylor developed what is now called scientific management. The management style broke down work into small pieces that could be performed by an individual. Hence the individual loses his sense of ownership as his work is a small cog of the wheel. Pride of building a house was replaced with mundanity of layering bricks. The system also required a close watch on workers and led to hierarchy of supervisors whose main responsibility was to monitor others.  The classical function of management was described as “Planning, Resource Allocation, Monitoring and Control”.

In the last one hundred and fifty years, the world has changed tremendously. Today with information technology the work has become more complex and inter-dependant. The work is becoming more knowledge based and hence humans now have to be motivated to create and produce unlike 1800s when they had to drive machines.  Development of intelligent machines would add more complexity to our roles.

So the challenge before managements in future would be

1. How to develop workplaces and design motivational schemes so as to acknowledge and fulfill need for self-actualization by knowledge workers. Get knowledge workers to share their knowledge, cooperate and collaborate with each other.
2. Develop control systems that are effective yet allow senior management to devolve decision making to the operational teams.

This would be possible with learning organizations. Organizations that would be able to respond to changes in the environment and adapt. My experience with diverse organizations has made me believe that democracy is a pre-requisite to a Learning Organization and teams are essential to democracy.

Team based structure would allow organizations to be nimble and respond to tactical opportunities available in the field. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/what-corporate-managers-can-learn-from-football-teams/). Peer based control systems would ensure that all the members of the team conform to the norms. Consensus based decision making process would also ensure that the teams take optimal decisions. Structuring team based networked organizations has been possible and one of the most notable examples has been US Army operations in Iraq (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/building-football-teams-at-work/).

Some of the challenges that I foresee in developing empowered teams are 1) Developing leadership in teams and 2) Developing good sub-cultures within the team. These challenges also define role and functions of Management or Board, that is, to ensure that all the teams understand the purpose and their role in achieving it, hold people accountable to maintain culture of the organization. The responsibility of the team to have adequate resources and developing a plan can be delegated to the team. Would it take a big load off shoulders of management?

Building football teams at work

Tags

Football, Human Resource Management, Organisation Structure, Teams

The world has become very complex and is moving to an age of artificial intelligence. Toffler would have defined it as the fourth wave. This age is characterized with quick dissemination of information, a globally connected world with services being provided digitally over the wire. The markets, including financial markets are interlinked, connected and inter-dependent. The orderly world, in which companies knew and understood their business environment, knew their competitors, could predict and prepare strategic plans has now given to a world where their business could be upstaged by a disruptive technology from a startup on the other side of the world. Competition is always on heels threatening to bite if pace slackens. Organizations can only survive by building teams that can respond to changes in environment, take decisions and implement them. These are teams that have the authority, responsibility and accountability for their decisions, something similar to football teams (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/what-corporate-managers-can-learn-from-football-teams/). With increasing complexity and increasing dependence of tasks, a person could be member of multiple teams that may run horizontally across functions or may run across vertically in a functional area. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/team-based-on-organisations-a-new-organisation-structure/). For example CFO in a country office would be member of senior executive team and also a member of finance team. The structure can be a strategic choice for the organizations to succeed.

The role of CXOs (CEOs, COOs, CMOs, CFOs etc) would be to build effective teams and build a culture with shared values that binds teams together. Effective teams are characterised by cooperation, collaboration and seamless interchangeability in roles. Teams, like Tribes, also have their own norms that all team members are expected to follow, and use peer pressure or social pressure to ensure compliance.
Organisations need to provide an enabling environment for teams to flourish and succeed. This would require changes in structures, policies and workflows. Some of my experiences are shared below

1. Recruitment is team’s responsibility. Interpersonal relationships are an important element of team success besides trust. Hence it is essential that primary responsibility for recruitment resides with the team. The team could recruit by building consensus amongst its members or giving each member a veto. At Srijan Technologies, a company I worked with, our philosophy was that recruitment is everyone’s responsibility. Beyond functional skills, it is attitude and other soft skills that are important but are difficult to gauge through questions. Attitudes and biases can be sensed by individuals. That is why we preferred in-person interviews over ones on skype or phone. While the immediate team got more weightage, the interviews also included extended teams or other stakeholders who would be working with that candidate. We once had a situation where a senior developer and the CEO had differing judgements on a business analyst candidate. We had an open discussion on the issue and finally went with the senior developer’s choice. Another instance I recollect is from CARE, an international NGO. We were interviewing for a project manager for a program with commercial sex workers (CSW). The project director included some CSW’s in the interview panel. His hypothesis was that if a candidate is not comfortable interviewing with a CSW then they would not be comfortable managing the project, and a CSW could best assess the candidate’s comfort. I would say the same logic extends to teams.

2. Successful teams sit and work together. Getting all the members to sit together is the most effective way to minimize information asymmetry within a team. Physical proximity promotes and encourages transparency. There are no barriers to communication such as inertia of lifting a phone or calling someone when s/he is busy. The team members can see each other’s availability and quickly resolve issues. One of the biggest advantages of such arrangement is the formation of deeper bonds within team members. Teams provide an emotional anchor especially to new members. The company does not have to run a mentorship program. The team members act as mentors and guides. Since the same cannot be done for Distributed teams – other tools and practices need to be adopted. For example, scheduling a daily team meeting; Tools like common folder with access rights to everyone. Thanks to tools like google docs, chatbots, etc., Distributed teams can collaborate effectively.
3. Democracy in organization and teams – One of the ways to improve decision making in teams is to encourage team to take decisions by consensus. This may seem like wastage of time, but it ensures ownership of decisions by all the team members. People understand democracy as decision making by voting or decisions of majority. But actually democracy is much more than that. ( https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/04/27/indian-experience-with-democracy/ ). At Srijan we encouraged teams to take decisions by consensus.

4. Team is the Boss. We delegated all operational decisions to the team such as negotiations with the customer, pacing the project, allocation of work to the team. Decisions on approval of leave or work from home was delegated to the team. A supervisor is supposed to monitor the work, but its peers or team members who can provide the best assessment of whether a person has turned in an honest day’s work or not. In my work life, I have come across situations where companies have multiple layers of authority delineation. In practice, I have seen managers trusting the teams or person on the ground and approving those requests without even simple questions. Organizations can cut down on decision making processes by delegating most of the approvals to the teams and also empowering teams by giving them authority but also hold them accountable.

5. Communication, Trust and feedback – It is essential to build trust and communication between the team members. This helps in reducing politics or charges of favouritism. At Srijan, we would even have 360 degree feedbacks with all the team members sitting together and providing feedback to each other. The rule was that anything that cannot be said in open should not be said. The fact that the organization was structured around roles and not positions also meant that there was no competition amongst team members. At the organization level, the company used to keep open books. We had sessions where the balance sheet and profit & loss account was shared with everyone. The most important behaviour that seniors have to demonstrate is to allow juniors to question them on their decisions. Give out a message that no subject is taboo and all conversations are welcome.

6. Abolish performance appraisal system and have Shared Goals and Shared rewards. Teams can only work when the team shares rewards and frustrations of defeat and no single person is singled out for either. It is no wonder that football (soccer in US) does not have man of the match award like cricket has ( https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/teams-and-performance-appraisal-systems/ ). A good team of learners who are motivated and enjoy their work would like quality output and ease out anyone who slows down the team. More often than not, the person would automatically move out. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal mentions in his book “Team of teams” most often repeated reason for dropping out of Seal’s training program BUD/S was that I cannot slow down the team. Rather be the weakest link in the chain, people move out.

Replace Performance appraisal with performance feedback and counselling. Use it to provide feedback to an employee. https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/salaries-and-performance-appraisal/. We at Srijan used system of Salaries and performance bonus to reward performance during the year.

7. Define purpose of the organisation and teams. In this fast changing business environment, the companies will have to redefine their indices for growth. The inspiration to growth will come from purpose. What the organization plans to do and achieve. Similarly teams find meaning in their work if they identify with its purpose. If the team knows its purpose, it will also be more confident in moving away from established procedures to ensure that the purpose is met with.

8. Define values and hold teams and people accountable. The team has to fit in the larger organization and should share the same values and culture. Culture and values act as glue and bind the teams together. A very good example of it is Mckinsey that operates as distributed teams but come together as one company with one culture.

In a nutshell, if companies can create teams with diverse set of people, develop a culture of trust and decision making by consensus and are willing to share information with the teams, remove barriers to flow of information within the organization, then the organizations can create self-managed, self-learning teams

What corporate managers can learn from Football teams.

Tags

Football, Human Resource Management, Soccer, Strategic Management, Teams

The world of business management is becoming more of a game of football.

Managers of football teams formulate strategies and decide on playing formation. On the field, though, the team has to think on its feet and respond in real time to a chaotic and ever changing situation, which is no different from business environment today. It has to respond to strategies, tactics and on-field formations of the rival team. The team manager can interject only in a limited way, i.e. peripherally, from the side-lines, during breaks and substitutions.

As the game progresses, the players take on each other’s roles depending on the situation with no manager or captain to instruct them. The players are a team in the truest sense. Every player is aware of the objective. That is, to score a goal and to prevent the other side from scoring. There is role clarity, mission clarity and group cohesion. Eventually, the team that succeeds is the one which is more adaptable and responsive than the other, skills, speed and stamina notwithstanding.

This defines the roles of managers as well. Just like football managers, the managers in the corporate world have to build good teams with necessary skills; build an organizational culture and eventually hold people accountable to that cultural credo. They have to build self-governed teams in which members trust each other and have the liberty to question one another and resolve differences apart from learning from their mistakes.

Today, the business management world is very different from the 1900s when Taylorism (Scientific Management) flourished and efficiency was fervently worshipped and pursued. A business dialectic which mandated profit only with lowering of costs, led to a stratification of work-place culture into managers (the guys with brains) and workers (the guys with brawn). Any creativity from workers was discouraged.

Today, advances in information and communication technology have made it possible to eliminate information asymmetry both within the organisation (between staff) and in the market place. Bowing down to person who proposed Strong and Weak market theory in finance, today no company or brand can dominate the market or no company can consistently beat the market.

The life of strategic innovations does not last few months, forget about years. A small development on the opposite side of the world can throw the best prepared strategic plans out of gear. Similarly, the working class distinctions are now dimmed with services taking equal importance as products do. Today people plan and also implement and have blurred the class distinctions that Taylorism had created. No class distinctions can be made in consulting, process outsourcing services, Information Technology etc.

All these developments would force CXOs to devolve planning, resource generation, control and monitoring functions, traditional management functions, to operational staff or people at the field. The rapidly changing marketplace, in which strategic advantages cannot be sustained forever, is pushing and will further push companies to ensure that advantageous tactical opportunities are not lost. The organisations of today cannot afford a big and slow hierarchy with endless levels of approvals. Lean, mean, flat and nimble – this the trinity of survival. The organisation of tomorrow will not be hierarchy of individuals but a network of teams. (https://rajneeshrastogi.wordpress.com/2015/02/26/team-based-on-organisations-a-new-organisation-structure/ )

Given the current levels of competitiveness, many companies are now providing increased autonomy and more effective risk-delimited freedom at workplaces. They are eliminating redundant and obsolete hygiene encumbrances to improve motivation and productivity, and are trying to tap into the latent creativity of their employees. For example, at Srijan, we would let team members approve each other’s leaves, work from homes and let them hold each other accountable through daily standups.

The managers of today have to increasingly rely on teams of members with complimentary skills, a democratic framework where team members can challenge each other’s mindsets to develop optimal solutions or take optimal decisions. Peer level controls, or as some people say, tribal controls, have proven to be more effective in ensuring compliance with organisation norms and value of the team. effective cohesive team of high performers would automatically develop its own criteria for recruitment and would ease off performers who are not able to meet with their quality standards.

Once the team members understand the purpose of the organisation, the role of the team to which they belong, and are equipped with the necessary information, the organization would win. Does this then beg the question: who should build such teams?

Salaries and Performance Appraisal

Tags

Demotivator, HR, Hygiene, Motivator, Performance Appraisal, Salary

Talk to people in most companies and one common villain that most people have is HR. Probe deeper and the villain would turn out to be an unfair or unjust performance appraisal. If we go down another level, it would be unhappiness with history of increments.

The objective of performance appraisal system is to provide a feedback to an employee on his or her performance. The appraisal process is a feedback on factors affecting performance. The inputs from performance appraisal system along with guidance and mentoring are supposed to help a person shape his or her career.

Linking performance to appraisal leads to distortion of the process. The employees are keen to get a better rating, than hear the feedback. The discussion shifts from feedback to debate on rating between the employee and supervisor and what is written on the paper. The supervisor and supervisee in most cases are also not able to bring in instances, attitudes or behaviours that do not conform to format of appraisal but do affect the final rating. A poor rating is not seen as reflection of performance but an outcome of inter-personal relationship between supervisor and supervisee. The companies tried to address it by bringing in super boss into the equation but did not help anyone as the underlying assumption was not addressed.

Despite all the efforts of HR to make the system work and to make the process more fairer and agreeable to all, the supervisee who gets a bad rating mostly leaves the table with a feeling that I got a poor appraisal as my boss played favourites. Companies have tried experiments and methods like 360 feedback but they all backfire. This is because of lack of trust. A closed 360 degree means that people feel the feedback was taken from people who have connived with the supervisor.

Linking performance appraisal to increments may defeat exercises like bell curve as people may not like to take smart people in their team for that will squeeze them to centre of the bell curve. This affects competence of the team and would breed mediocrity.

The only way the damage can be undone is by delinking performance appraisal from salary. The performance appraisal is a continuous exercise and should be retained that way with both formal and informal components.

This would surely shock most of my colleagues from business school who believe good performances should be rewarded and bad performances should be punished. The underlying assumption still being that money or salary is a motivator or it can be both carrot and stick. This world view still comes from industrial revolution where the assumption was people are lazy or do not want to work unless they are provided incentives or penalised for not working.

Bell curve ensures that people just do not have to give their best but just be ahead of rest of the team mates. This breeds a feeling of competitiveness where colleagues do not like to pass on knowledge or play in team. This also leads to situations where people can only show a better performance by downplaying someone else’s performance leading to sub-groups and office politics. This does nothing to raise standards in office.

In this age of knowledge workers, organisations that do well are organisations that are able to tap intrinsic motivation in their employees. Companies need to figure out what kind of employees it wants. People who need money to excel or people who want to excel. The latter would pull up their peers and raise the standard of company and in the process make money. Money is an outcome and not an input resource.

This is why, we at Srijan delinked our salaries and performance appraisal.

Open Salaries

Tags

Human Resource Management, Open, Salary

The other day, I heard a radio jockey talk of a company planning to be transparent on salaries of employees. She called up a HR professional who was not only dismissive of the idea but also of the people.
To me his attitude was surprising. Srijan had been practicing it much before I had started engaging with it. Our assumption was simple. However much an organisation may want to keep it confidential, people do get to know each other’s salaries. This breeds lot of discontentment and frustration. For example, I have this friend who moved from academics to industry. She was content and happy till the time, she realized that salary of her sub-ordinate was higher than her salary. The more worrisome part for her was that her peer would be at even higher salary. Coming from academics, she could not factor the exact multiplier between academics and industry. This led to dip in her performance. And it started affecting her performance. Within a year, she moved to another company at a higher salary. The company by keeping salaries confidential gives a message that it would not engage in a discussion on it. Most people are able to vent out this frustration to their immediate or close friends but that does not help as continuous interaction with your colleagues keep reminding the person of the gap.
People associate salaries not only as a means to acquire assets and improve their quality of life but also with esteem. With the concept, market pays you what you are worth, the companies inadvertently also send a message that people in same roles are valued differently. This can be a big blow for a person’s self esteem.
The salary process that we employed at Srijan was open. Everyone’s salary was listed in a google spreadsheet. So people could compare and decide on their own salaries. This helped us in two ways. People could not only question their own salaries but also salaries of others who they did not feel deserve it. By bringing out these conversations in open, we could avoid inter-personal issues and also any discontentment due to salary. This was very different from companies where the salaries are kept confidential. The companies give out a message that they do not want to discuss this issue. Any discussion on salaries is countered with the question, “how did you get the information” and thereby pushing the person on defensive and derailing the whole discussion,thereby letting the discontent simmer and it ends with the person leaving the organisation.
Open salaries will also address issue of pay disparities between employees of different levels. The disparities will kick in peer pressure and if not formally, will bring in an informal pressure to ensure that salaries are not very disparate, both inter and intra grade. Most importantly open salaries send out a signal to the employees that they can talk and discuss salaries. It is not a taboo subject and for HR guys, it is not something that can be discussed with employee at the time of exit interview only.