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by: Elizabeth Pinchot
Even progressive organizations can foster a
pervasive sense of powerlessness. And in companies with ordinary distributions of
power-with conventional differences in authority, pay, privilege, and status-almost
everyone feels powerlessness. Even the CEO may feel powerless before the board and
investment community.
When we feel powerless and disenfranchised,
we struggle to insert our best initiative and intelligence into the system, and for
good reason: Power as the dominant control system creates bottlenecks, and squeezes
a lot of intelligence out of the picture, Even the best-intentioned manager in an
approval chain overrides local judgment and slows down the rate of change.
Every revolution has the same theme, flattening
of the pyramid of the hierarchy. Power tends to corrupt, and being overpowered can
waste the spirit and will. To keep our corporate pyramids flat and to make the most
of a flatter structure requires tools that cut far deeper than headcount reductions
in management. For nations, these tools include the rights of free speech, of assembly,
of joint and private ownership, of democratic decision-making, to buy and sell, and
empowering education for all.
We are starting to see parallel rights in large
commercial organizations. When Japanese and advanced Western high-tech firms use
one-third the managers per unit of output as their competitors, they are not just
'tightening their belts they are moving toward a different power structure to direct
and control their operations and "develop" their prime assets, their people.
Confederation of Teams
Many revolutionsˆwhether quality, cycle time,
effectiveness, intrapreneurship or organizational learningˆhave this in common: at
the core is a basic shift of day-to-day control and feedback systems from the functional
hierarchy to cross-functional teams.
The quality revolution is the most successful
formal attack on bureaucracy and has inspired great progress toward democratic and
collaborative work systems. It begins with recognition that the quality of intelligence
needed to meet customer specifications requires the intelligence of every person.
This means training everyone in making decisions, empowering teams to seek answers,
and implementing them. The power invest in hierarchy is challenged when employees
make decisions in cross-disciplinary teams; the belief in the efficiency of specialization
is undermined when teamwork speeds up development time and raises productivity to
boot.
In transitional organizations, decisions are
first made cross-functionally in both formal and informal teams and then ratified
by the functional chiefs who still hold power over budgets, headcounts, and reviews.
Organizations as confederations of cross-boundary teams re-distribute and balance
the power and spread intelligence and responsibility more widely.
Teams balance opportunities for personal development,
changing the comparative drudgery of work at the base of the hierarchy to a true
learning environment. The experience of self-regulating action with collaborative
responsibility for large pieces of a process has the power to give honest feedback
to the actors. This learning springs from the wealth of communication in the team's
collaborations within itself, with other teams, with suppliers and with customers.
These knowledge-based collaborations, when embedded in concrete mission and values,
become the system of control. No matter how willing we are to change, finding a practical
pathway from entrenched bureaucratic control structures to ii empowered confederation
of teams is the challenge of the decade.
The Simple Solution
The simple solution is training or education.
To have democratic workplaces with self-organizing collaboration, workers from top
to bottom must be well educated in the skills of self-directed action, communication,
creativity, team building, conflict resolution, consensus building, value-based judgment,
and collaborative leadership, as well as scientific and technical knowledge. We don't
need more people willing to blindly follow orders or do rote repetitive work. We
need people of courage and initiative with the ethical and ecological wisdom to put
it all together for the long term.
Though simple, this is a tall order, requiring
a re-invention of educational systems that parallel the corporate restructuring.
Both are required to keep pace with the shift from bureaucracy to knowledge-based
teamwork, the "third wave" techno-social revolution that the Tofflers call
the "de-massification" of society. As our economy becomes focused on high-tech,
information-laden products and services, heterogeneity (lots of different products
and services) will be the rule in consumption, requiring more local empowerment of
knowledge workers to respond more flexibly to customers. The frightening part of
this revolution is the further redistribution of economic and political power to
those few privileged with superior education, and the gradual disempowerment of unskilled
and educationally deprived workers who in earlier times could become useful to large
bureaucracies needing masses of unskilled workers. If we do not focus significant
resources on educating and empowering all our workers, the disparities in power and
wealth will tear our society apart.
Self-Organizing Systems
While working conditions in bureaucracies have
improved steadily, there has been hubris in our attempts to design from on high the
one best structure. Each improvement solves a problem of the last design, but never
confronts the inherent problems of concentrated power (and widespread disempowerment).
For example, the matrix organization addresses the increasingly "multi-dimensional"
nature of business that serves multiple products to multiple markets in multiple
geographic regions. This structure reflects some of the needed connections to integrate
giant global conglomerates, but a basic point is missed: without the power of individuals
to create their own networks based on their local understanding, the intelligence
in the system can get lost in the gridlock of delays and turf wars. The result is
people working together without a significant choice in their work, gradually shutting
down their intelligence and responsibility.
In bureaucracy at its worst, we get to thinking
we can play god with people's lives, and ignore the laws of life all around usˆwhich
require variety, redundancy, and diversity to create robust multiple solutions to
survival. A symptom of bureaucracy in decline is an increasing tolerance of the absurd.
"Demassification" is not just a need of high tech organizations, it's a
basic need of all living things. Biologists point to a similar phenomenon: different
species using quite different systems, adapted to the local conditions, to reach
the similar ends-making the system far more capable of dealing with a changing environment.
This variety allows for cooperative (and self-organizing) social arrangements, which
biologists now see as the basis of survival as much as the struggle of "tooth
and claw."
The best leaders create and serve cooperative
environments where people "do it themselves." Long before "empowerment"
was a buzz-word, executives committed to getting good work done learned to sneak
a little power out of the hierarchy, and form their own informal networks of voluntary
cross-functional and cross-organizational connections.
The self-directed, knowledge-based collaborations
of the informal network connect all the parts to build an effective organizational
brain. The pattern of potential interconnections is far more complex, appropriate,
and fluid than any designer could draw. Like the complex structures of nature, the
design comes not from a hierarchical control point, but from the workings of a self-organizing
system of voluntary associations, the model of the organization of the future. Working
in parallel teams with real choices, decisions, and accountability, all of us can
come to better and better answers. To the extent the teams are empowered, trained
in collaboration, and bound by mission and values, a system of teams can build organizations
of far greater intelligence and responsibility.
This shift in patterns of work (collaborative
and cross-functional) and decision making (local, team centered, and distributed)
can't be ordered, ruled, or legislated. It is all about autonomous action, about
the locus of control returning to individuals who reach out and choose compatriots
to share the risk, strengthen their judgment, complement their skills, and support
each other in stretching themselves. Beneath the formal workings of bureaucracies
grow informal networks of collaboration-patterns we create for ourselves to get our
work done-that model the future of organizations as integrated confederations of
teams.
Whole System Intelligence
When power is balanced and influence spread
laterally, intelligence and responsibility are awakened, widened, and strengthened
by one's fellows. Within teams, people work side by side with those of different
expertise, and the close combination of this multiple expertise produces the whole-system
ingenuity and intelligence. As members combine; their knowledge and skills, they
learn the basics of each others' disciplines, and a more rounded intelligence grows
within each individual. On-going training must support the growth of the team's depth
and versatility, and yet close collaboration on cross-functional teams is the ultimate
learning laboratory and the best way to build business judgment.
As each member builds up wider and deeper skills,
the organization builds a reserve power to meet the shifting demands of the future.
The teams learn larger system thinking as they bump into other teams whose input
or cooperation they need. If they work out these differences and help each other
without hierarchical intervention, their grasp of the whole system further expands.
Their team skills create collaborative relations with customers and suppliers and
even with organizations others might consider competitors. With habits of trust and
trustworthiness as the ground for the multiple partnerships, individual and group
responsibility grows out of their emerging collective wisdom.
Role of Leadership
The new teamˆbased systems that are replacing
bureaucracy are integrating two challenges that are mutually exclusive in hierarchies:
on the one hand, flexible response to diversity and change, and, on the other, organizational
focus and integration. Jack Welch, Jr. of GE calls the "boundaryless" behavior
of team-based organizations "integrated diversity," and part of the program
is protecting against compulsive management.
Fortunately for management, integrated teams
do not flourish in a laissez-faire environment. A team can't do work in large organizations
without managers, sponsors, or coordinators helping them integrate their effort internally
and manage their external interconnections. Future leaders must manage the paradox
between freedom and connectedness. The best families and organizations maximize both,
while supporting the growth and development of all individuals.
Effective leaders give unprecedented freedom
to people to select their own goals and then figure out their own system of doing
the work. No idea emerges more clearly from the 30 years of study of Lewin, Deming
and Weisbord than this: If the plans are determined locally by the doers, they will
be easy to implement. We all know instances of disaster, literally, arising from
a wide gap between the planners and engineers and those who must implement. On the
other side of the paradox, tasks such as building a space shuttle or a new computer
require that leadership assist in the integration of task and information up, down
and sideways, so the effort can be implemented.
Peter Drucker talks about the model of servant
leadership in Managing the Non-Profit Organization. (Non-profits are often closer
to the organizations of the future if only because they are dependent on the willingness
and commitment of volunteers. All high standard, self-directed work is voluntary.)
"All the people in the central organization must remind themselves all the time:
we are the servants of the local chapter. It is part of our job to make sure they
have standards; but we are their servants. They do the work. We are not their bosses;
we are their conscience."
The conscience is not only about maintaining
the coordinated interests of the organization while exhibiting high standards of
performance of product and service development and delivery. It is also about high
standards of relations among the teams, and keeping a balance of the feedback positive.
Fairness is imperative in opportunities and rewards. Leaders and sponsors can serve
by balancing the power, facilitating communications and decision-making, demanding
higher levels of communications and fair negotiations toward getting the job done.
For instance, one value is a balance of gender
and race. Open team-based systems give more opportunity for women and minorities,
just as they empower everyone else. Given structures and processes to balance the
power, and given excellent education and training to all, the contributions of minorities
and women will provide needed creative freshness in the system.
Leaders and sponsors ensure diversity of representation
in teams and help supervise training, with a gentle continuous slope for each individual
to new areas of competence. Teams, as collaborative units of knowledge and skill,
deserve protection as much as custom capital equipment.
But turning the control over to teams raises
a fear of the conflict all too familiar in un-managed groups. Quality leadership
is all the more important in the absence of strong hierarchical authority. It is
the art of leadership to reduce conflict by making the common purposes inspirational,
and by surrounding the collaborations with strong values, mission, and standards.
Teams succeed when there is a clear and compelling goal, and they fail when people
lose sight of the goal and begin pursuing selfish or parochial interests. An unwavering
commonly held purpose lifts the team out of the selfishness and focus on turf and
into coherence.
Leadership keeps in front of everyone the overarching
values and goals, the mission immutables, including the subtle details of how people
treat each other (which determines the standards of work as well as how we treat
customers), while supporting the continuous group-led mutations of tactics and strategy.
Leadership facilitates quality relationships and balances power.
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