The Psychology of Self-Managing Teams
I have worked with over 100 managers and teams, which includes building around 40 high-performance, self-managing teams. From this work, I have learnt that there are common reasons why managers and teams fail and why both do not develop to their full potential. The reasons are simple in nature and are relatively easy to correct, making you a better manager with a dedicated, loyal, self-managing team.
The majority of training in today’s companies is ineffective due to the purpose, timing, and content of the training being flawed. Training courses that run for just a couple of days or a week have been proven in several studies to be a waste of time. Pre-and post-training surveys by McKinsey show that most managers thought little had changed due to training, even though it had been inspiring at the time. The same surveys also showed that most employees quickly regressed to their pre-training performance.
What do today’s employees want?
Today's millennial generation, unlike the baby boomers before them, are vocal about what they want their workplace to look like; they will not accept old-style methods of traditional management, which they view as managing, administering, stifling, unreasonable and unwarranted. They want managers and workplaces that recognize them for their efforts and that are collaborative and supportive.
Millennials place "my job" equally or even ahead of "my family" as their dream. So, because their life is more focused on work, they need to draw more from their work environment. They have their best friends at work - including best friends who are customers. They want to stay with an organization that helps them grow and develop.
Millennials want meaningful work, a job that isn’t just about paying the bills but is connected to a purpose that makes them feel fulfilled and valuable. Today’s employees care deeply about diversity and do not want to be treated as employees but as colleagues or partners. They believe that they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance and want to feel like they have an open and honest relationship with their manager and co-workers. They want to know that their opinion is valued and receive a good deal of feedback.
They will not accept toxic behaviours from their bosses, such as playing favourites, bullying or managers who abuse their position to gain monetary or sexual rewards; these are deeply disliked.
Finally, today’s employees want a combination of a progressive management style and being a member of a high-performance, self-managing team. These fulfil their willingness and desire to work across teams, as well as their constant need for feedback, reinforcement, and praise for being tech-savvy. No matter how they are viewed, the simple truth is that today’s employees look at work dramatically differently from the baby boomer generation that preceded them.
Why most teams fail to deliver
Most teams have a fixed mindset that they can't improve, change, or re-frame their situation. This I call 'team quicksand', where a team becomes immobilised and can't move forward. Team quicksand stops teams from achieving high performance. The biggest problem is that team members fail to realise their team's positive aspects by focusing on the negative, with little realisation of how capable the team actually is and how they can do better.
Traditional team organization has not changed much since the 1960s. Research by Deloittes confirms that managers who move from a traditional hierarchical mindset to a self-managing mindset achieve substantially greater results, including things like increased productivity, higher personal job satisfaction and less stress for everyone. How you as a manager see and relate to your team is the single most significant determinant of how well your team works.
Self-Managing Teams, High-Performance
Self-managing teams are teams that, in conjunction with and also in isolation from their manager, decide what work needs to be done and how and when it is done. In self-managing teams, team members are considered to be equal; there are no distinctions about seniority or privilege. A way of describing this is to say that everyone is of equal status and value. Team members have different jobs, backgrounds, experiences, knowledge, skills, and strengths. Self-managing team members need to have complete autonomy and empowerment, they need to feel that they can express their views without fear of retribution or ridicule, they need to be able to decide rules of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour.
DIY Team Training
This DIY Rapid Team Training program addresses 10 common dysfunctions that plague virtually every team and, at the same time, it builds a self-managing, high-performance team. Designed for busy managers, each of the following training program sections has a corresponding Workshop Handout with Training Instructions to let you deliver the program.
1. Poor management communication
It’s important to take notice of how you communicate. Here is how to have a professional conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and without offending somebody. We've all had really great conversations. We've had them before. We know what it's like.
2. Lack of a progressive management style
Your management style has a significant impact on the way you and your team operate, the right management style promotes team member engagement and makes your team members feel more comfortable approaching you with questions, suggestions, and ideas. The right management style substantially increases your confidence and lowers your stress levels. When you have a management style that fits your personality, your objectives, your team, and your business, not only can you focus more on exercising your strengths and achieving your goals but doing so becomes far easier.
3. Disengaged team members
Disengaged team members feel no real connection to their jobs and tend to do the bare minimum, they do as little as possible to get by. Disengagement can show in several ways, a 9-to-5 clock mentality or a tendency to seal oneself off from other team members. It becomes most noticeable when someone who's ordinarily outgoing and enthusiastic seems to fall by the wayside and has nothing positive to contribute. They may resent their job, tend to gripe to co-workers and drag down office morale.
4. Lack of autonomy and empowerment
Team members who do not have autonomy or empowerment require external motivation. Whereas team members who do possess autonomy and empowerment do not. Autonomy and empowerment are critical attributes of self-managing teams; without them, you have frustrated team members who are constantly reminded that they're not trusted to make even small decisions let alone the bigger ones; this saps motivation and leads to resentment.
5. Team members do not understand each other
When a team knows each other’s working styles, backgrounds, diversity, strengths, and skills this adds to the team’s overall consciousness in terms of what assets the team possesses and how the team can best use them. Five questionnaires are used to allow team members to show each other their respective attributes.
6. No common vision
Ordinary teams respond to a mandate from outside their team making them entirely internally focused, whereas self-managing teams define their own team vision. In an ordinary team, the manager is the backbone and functions as the support system for teamwork and collaboration. In a ship analogy, managers are the people with their eyes on the horizon, managers are the ones reading the map. The manager of an ordinary team plots the course and shows team members how to get there. However, this does not apply to self-managing teams where the whole team reads the map and determines the team’s direction.
7. No standards of behaviour
In this workshop team members agree on what is acceptable and unacceptable team behaviours. Self-managing teams define a set of team rules as standards of behaviour. The establishment of clear ground rules gives a team its cultural and psychologically safe baseline. It is a fundamental step in team development. Team rules increase psychological safety and reduce potential conflict.
8. Poor team communication
This workshop involves making changes to the way team members communicate. If you want to create chaos where confusion runs rampant and production is low, then work in a team that does not know how to communicate. We all know that poor communication is at the root of all problems. What is required is open communication which means practising mutually beneficial and honest discussions. This doesn't just refer to meetings or other work activities, but also to keeping others appraised on important matters, sharing fears, and seeking counselling from others.
9. No master plan
A team can only consistently deliver when team members are working toward a common plan. Individuals and separate teams require their own work plans like project plans, but what is also required is a joint Master plan.
10. Meetings people don’t want to attend
This workshop is about how to run team meetings, so people want to attend. It covers content, format, protocols, shared leadership and how to tell if your meetings are effective. Let’s face it, one of the things that take up most of your time is meetings. Self-managing teams hold meetings that you want to attend because they are productive, and efficiently make use of your time.
The ‘DIY Rapid Team Training Program’
All you need to do to build a self-managing, high-performance team is follow the ‘DIY Rapid Team Training Program’, something that I have specifically developed to let busy team leaders and managers train their teams. The ‘DIY Rapid Team Training Program’ contains complete workshop handouts and accompanying, easy-to-follow training instructions designed for you.
The program is the same one I use in my training and consulting.
Get the DIY Rapid Team Training Program at its 50% off, introductory price.