Kimball Fisher - Leading Self-Directed Work Teams: A Guide to Developing New Team Leadership Skills

Copyright 2000 by Kimball Fisher. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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I rededicate this book to Reenie,
My wife, my colleague, and my best friend

Dont mourn what you arent, celebrate what you are.

Mareen Fisher

A NEW KIND OF LEADER FOR A NEW KIND OF BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

BUILDING THE FOUNDATION FOR CHANGE

THE POWER OF VALUES AND ASSUMPTIONS

THE ROLE OF THE TEAM LEADER

THE TEAM LEADER WORKOUT

COMMON PROBLEMS AND UNCOMMON SOLUTIONS

TEAM LEADER EVALUATION TOOLS

EMPOWERMENT AND TEAMS have taken the world by storm. Managers have found that remaining competitive means tapping into the vast, underutilized resource of knowledge within their workforces. Furthermore, customer responsiveness requires greater integration across functional groups. Cross-functional teams have thus become commonplace as organizations strive for reduced product-to-market times and continuous improvement throughout the value chain. But making teams function effectively has remained an elusive dream for many organizations.

Modern business culture, to a great extent built on individualism and a diversity of interests, runs counter to teams. Teamwork requires pulling a group of diverse individuals together to work toward a common goal. Some managers take the term self-management literally and expect teamwork to happen somehow by magic. But teamwork does not just emerge. It requires strong leadership throughout the entire organization.

Managers at several new plant start-ups believed they could run their operations without supervisors or first-level managers, only to find they needed to add back that level of management as their operations failed to perform. A manager at one plant where first-level supervisors were eliminated noted that things ran fairly smoothly four out of five days a week but that the plant could really use supervision on that fifth day. However, the manager was afraid to reinstitute a leadership role because he did not know how to keep team leaders from reverting back to acting as traditional supervisors.

For years, organizational consultants have used the terms coach, trainer, facilitator, and resource to describe the leadership role. Coach and trainer are at least fairly familiar words, but facilitator and resource often sound like terms from another world. They are ambiguous. Worse yet, the role evolves as teams mature. Making sense out of this new environment is far from easy. Much confusion still exists as to what the role of team leadership is all about.

Kimball Fisher helps to elevate us out of the jargon with real-world examples and tips to make the transition. He has seen what works and what doesnt from firsthand observationboth as a team leader in a successful self-directed team operation and as a consultant helping organizations transform themselves from traditional to empowered work systems. He is thus able to provide a roadmap showing how organizations can create an environment that promotes the development of team leaders.

But as Kimball rightly stresses, it is insufficient to merely develop leaders at the first level of management. Leadership must occur at every level of the organization, including the top executive suite. And as difficult as the task of changing to team leadership may seem at the first level of management, at the middle management and executive levels it is even harder. Fortunately, Kimball provides a vision for how to make the journey.

Janice Klein

Gloucester, MA

Jan Klein has taught operations management at the Harvard Business School and MITs Sloan School of Management. Over the past decade, she has been studying the changing role of managers and supervisors in organizations.