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Self-Directed Team: Part V - The Tools, cont.

© Lincoln Bittner

Management's job is to properly set the stage for the success of the change initiative. In this case the change was from a managed team to a self-directed team. The tools that will be used by management to facilitate this transition will be communication, hiring, training, coaching, and scaleable management. In this article, I will discuss the last two of these tools, coaching and scaleable management.

Coaching

Remember that your goal is to create a successful team that can work autonomously. Your managers must be able to deliver guidance whenever it is requested. They must be able to allow the team to make some mistakes without interfering. This will allow the team to grow naturally.

So what is required of the coach in this process? The coach is there to ensure that the team stays on track during the developmental stage. Teams will naturally move towards a leader/follower state if left unattended, as we saw in the scenario. The coach is there to make comments that stimulate the thought process for each of the team members, causing them to continue to think on their own. This enhances the feeling of accomplishment that each member must feel to promote continued growth. This feeling of accomplishment by each team member will lead to greater achievement by the team as a whole.

Remind them often that no one person is as smart as they all are collectively, and encourage them to consult each other often about decisions they are about to make. This will create an atmosphere of unity that is required for the success of the team.

Scaleable Management

To properly set up a self-directed team you need to include scaleable management in your plans. This means that you need to have managers who are going to be able to step back from the daily activities of the team as they recognize the teams' ability to handle the challenges that face them. Careful assessment of each manager's capabilities and strengths is in order before you begin to implement the self-directed team process.

One of the biggest mistakes that the manager in the scenario made was to decide on a steering committee rather than scaleable management. This was a mistake because the manager was replacing one kind of management structure with another. Neither structure allowed the team to progress to the point that they were truly self-directed.

The natural response to scalable management by the managers affected will be to fight the initiative. This is because they will feel that their positions will be eliminated once the team is functioning properly. If this is the intention of senior management, then they are missing the greatest opportunity to grow their business that ever existed. Self-directed teams are not meant to be a replacement for management, but are meant to allow management the time to properly grow the business.