Teamwork delivers performance

When you start a company from scratch its objectives are perfectly integrated in one mind. Managing and directing only a few people is easy, and you can work together without any thought about how you should be organised. Communications are immediate and direct, and objectives can be set, and questions and problems addressed quickly. When my company’s employee numbers reached fifty people we became departmentalised; divided by Design, Production, Sales and Administration. As we grew, these departmental functions were sub-divided, and we evolved a conventional tree-like management reporting structure. This did not suit my iconoclastic temperament or Glaswegian inclinations, which were inclined towards a relaxed equal status environment where we could have more fun working together.

To discharge its obligations to its external and internal suppliers and customers, a company must manage many tasks. All the tasks should be identified and specified, and every task should have an owner. Each employee should know which tasks they are responsible for, and the agreed customer requirements that they have to meet. This sounds obvious, but in practice it can be difficult to achieve, especially because as the company grows it becomes progressively more disintegrated.

To keep our company as integrated as possible, and as our employee numbers continued to grow, I decided to organise my people into teams rather than just departments. The teams were family sized, with around four to eight people, and included a team leader who was a playing captain rather than a foreman or manager. The teams were all aligned by their key customer and supplier relationships, with the objective of securing cross company cooperation. With teams working in parallel we could achieve more than we could previously, when we were working as managed individuals in a departmental hierarchy. Team working can empower every employee by making them personally responsible and accountable for warranting and improving the quality of their own work, and provide everyone with a peer review and problem solving support framework. All this assists the faster learning needed for responsive process and product improvement that motivates people who care about their work.

Changing working methods and structures is not always easy. For example, when I told the people who worked in our stores that they were now in their own team, they were mystified about the change. I knew that working in our stores was regarded as one of the less important jobs in our company. However, that was about to change. My plan was to automate materials handling and computerise distribution to support the product building teams, where one person was trusted to build an entire product from start to finish. This in turn meant that logistics would become one of the most capital intensive and complex aspects of the business. I explained that everyone would soon rely far more on each other to meet our production needs, and we would need to work better in small self-organising teams. The stores team looked at me in silence, until their newly appointed team leader said “Right, who is our team against?” I had to explain that the teams were not competing against each other, but would all work more effectively together to make our company and our products and service more competitive.

A team is not a committee. The team leader’s job is not to establish consensus, but is about maximising the contribution of each individual in the team. The purpose of teamwork is not about reaching compromises or to avoid arguments. Instead conviction should rule when it comes to people’s willingness to think, share and discuss information, and express their opinions frankly. No one is perfect, but a team can be. Strong independent team members are able to develop their skills, and maximise their employability, by learning how to do a better job. Each person in their own individual way can contribute to make their team and organisation more productive and competitive. However, all this also depends on the ability and judgement of the team leader. It is the team leader’s responsibility to assemble and assess all the information that can be gathered from his team and other sources. After listening to all the facts and opinions, the team leader has the sole responsibility to make the decisions. By participating and sharing the information available, there should be a team-wide willingness to support whatever decision has been made. As circumstances change, understanding develops, unforeseen problems are discovered, and new opportunities are spotted, then the team can actively work together to make the team leader’s decision as effective as possible.

All the team leaders in the organisation must cooperate to implement the company’s policies, and operate its problem solving processes using common strategies, to help meet the agreed objectives. Ideally the team leaders should also sit on the management team which is the highest decision-making body on operational matters, with the managing director as their team leader, so that between any employee and the operational head of the company there will be a maximum of one intermediary.

Flat reporting structures, honest communications, qualified, empowered, responsible, accountable and trusted individuals, enjoyable cooperation, shared objectives and understood strategy, all help to maximise an open organisation’s work potential. Success is never guaranteed in our working life, but fast learning organisations built around family sized teams should be agile and adept enough to greatly increase their chances of both survival and achievement. Conviction based on teamwork and commitment to a shared passion, based on belief in an organisation’s thinking processes, purpose and values, is the prerequisite for success at work. For the best results teams are the best organisation.

Ivor Tiefenbrun is a Scottish manufacturer