Management Insights

The Difference Between Groups And Teams

Groups don't become teams simply because that's what someone calls them. Many organizations have a "management team" but it doesn't mean that the members behave like a team or demonstrate teamwork. Most commonly, management teams meet periodically to provide each other with updates rather than to do real work together.

Teams differ fundamentally from groups because they require mutual accountability. Groups can be successful based on the contribution of individuals whereas a team requires people to work together to achieve a common goal. Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith capture this distinction in their definition of a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.”

Teams aren't always the best approach and groups or individuals can sometimes be more effective. If a task does not require joint work products, a group may be more effective. If a task requires people with interdependent skills to work across organizational silos then a team is most likely the best approach.

Unlocking The Potential of Frontline Managers

Frontline, or supervisory, managers are critical to the success of most organizations. They are responsible for the execution of strategy and direct up to two-thirds of the workforce. They are frequently responsible for activities that define the customer experience. However, the potential of frontline managers is often wasted. This makes companies less productive, less flexible, and less profitable.

The key difference between good and bad frontline managers is how they spend their time. Effective managers spend between 60 and 70 percent of their time on the floor providing hands-on support and individual coaching. Unfortunately, the majority of frontline managers only spend between 10 and 40 percent of their time doing this. They commonly spend 30 to 60 percent of their time on administrative work and meetings, and 10 to 50 percent on other non-managerial tasks such as travel or manual labor.

In my experience, there are two key reasons for this critical difference in how frontline managers spend their time.

1. Skills

The traditional view of frontline management was merely to oversee a limited number of direct reports, often in a passive "span breaking" capacity. Frontline managers were meant to communicate decisions, not make them; ensure compliance, not contribute ideas; and to oversee implementation, not to use judgement or discretion. In an attempt to change this, many organizations have tried to empower their frontline managers, with mixed results. In many cases, frontline managers lack the necessary skills or experience required in their new role. The largely technical skills that had seen them promoted from the floor are not the skills required as a frontline manager. Lacking the necessary skills - such as team building, problem solving, and coaching - they often feel insecure and exposed. Rather than providing hands-on management they busy themselves doing the work they should be supervising or finding reasons to hide in their office.

2. Bureaucracy

Many frontline managers are overwhelmed by unnecessary bureaucracy and needlessly complex paperwork. There are reports to be generated, plans to be created, and meetings to be attended. Much of this administrative burden is a hangover from the days of top-down management when senior managers made all of the decisions and needed to be kept informed of everything. Unfortunately, most organizations are very good at adding layers of administration but very poor at eliminating them. As a result, frontline managers are often occupied with the busy work of administration rather then the value-adding work of hands-on management.

So what should you do to unlock the potential of your frontline managers? Firstly, help them develop the skills to be successful through a combination of training, coaching, and peer feedback. Secondly, help them eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and reduce the complexity of administrative systems.

Spreading Good Behavior

The New York Times reports that recent research suggests that behavior is "contagious". Analysis of data from a heart study covering 15,000 people over 50 years suggests that both good and bad behavior - such as smoking, obesity and happiness - pass between people almost as if they were a contagious virus. This supports findings from a previous study at Dartmouth College which demonstrated that dorm mates "infect" each other with good and bad study habits.

Sociologists hypothesize that behaviors spread partly though subconscious social signals that we pick up from those around us, which serve as cues to what is considered normal behavior. It is also suggested that behavior is not only affected by the people immediate around us, but by others who are indirectly connected to us. For example, smoking appears to be spread socially - a friend taking up smoking increases your chance of smoking by 36 percent, and if you have a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you are 11 percent more likely to do the same. It is postulated that our ability to affect people up to three degrees away from us may have evolutionary roots since tribal groups that were tightly connected were more likely to pass along positive behaviors than those that weren't.

These findings have several important implications for managers. Firstly, it highlights the importance of positive role-modeling, hands-on management, and on-the-job coaching by front-line managers to seed good behavior. Secondly, it underlines the importance of building a strong workplace culture that rewards good behavior and encourages on-the-job socializing to spread desirable behavior. Finally, it stresses the importance of acting quickly to address bad behavior before it spreads to others.

The good news for managers who want to improve behavior, math is on your side. For most of us, within three degrees we are connected to more than 1000 people - all of whom we can theoretically help just by our own contagious behavior. It appears that managers really do get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate.

Practical Autonomy and the Roman Empire

Why did the Roman Empire grow so large and survive for so long? The Roman Empire lasted for 500 years in the west and then continued as the Byzantine Empire for another 1000 years in the east. At its peak the Roman Empire controlled approximately 6,500,000 square kilometers. There are few businesses today that could manage such a sprawling and diverse undertaking for so long without collapsing under their own weight.

From In Search of Excellence: "One reason the Roman empire grew so large and survived so long - a prodigious feat of management - is that there was no railway, airplane, car, radio, telephone. Above all, no telephone. And therefore you could not maintain any illusion of direct control over a general or provincial governor, you could not feel at the back of your mind that you could ring him up, or he could ring you, if a situation cropped up which was too much for him, or that you could fly over and sort things out if they started to get into a mess. You appointed him, you watched his chariot and baggage train disappear over the hill in a cloud of dust and that was that ... There was, therefore, no question of appointing a man who was not fully trained, or not quite up to the job: you knew that everything depended on his being the best man for the job before he set off. And so you took great care in selecting him; but more than that you made sure that he knew all about Rome and Roman government and the Roman army before he went out."

The key, it seems, was pushing autonomy to the lowest practical level. There is evidence that organizations that do this are able to be big but act small at the same time. Furthermore, people thrive when they perceive themselves as somewhat autonomous and demonstrate greater commitment when they are given discretion in how they do things. However, simply pronouncing that individuals have been granted autonomy is a formula for chaos, as the failure of many workplace empowerment initiatives have demonstrated. So how are we to give people practical autonomy?

The most important pre-requisite is a rigidly shared value system. Everyone must understand and be aligned with the organization's purpose and goals - why the organization exists and what its priorities are. Once the why and the what are clear, individuals should be allowed to exercise judgment and creativity in how things are done. Discipline around shared values provides a framework and gives people confidence to experiment based on stable expectations about what really counts.

Managers also need to demonstrate tough-minded respect for individuals by establishing clear accountabilities and mutually high-expectations. The organization should support this though frequent peer-reviews and a willingness to train, open dialogue and the sharing of goals, targets and performance measures, and by eliminating unnecessary complexity from centralized processes, systems, and organization structures.

The most difficult step for many managers is then giving-up the illusion of control by allowing individuals the freedom to do their work as they see fit, and then accepting the resulting messiness, overlap, and duplication.

The Romans may not have had much choice in how they managed given the practical constraints of the time. Today, we do have a choice. By establishing shared values and clear expectations we can provide the framework in which practical autonomy can be effective.

The Power of Positive Reinforcement

Successful companies are masters of using positive reinforcement to motivate their people. My first experience of a company that truly understood this was when I attended a Mary Kay event with my wife. I was vaguely aware of the pink Cadillac driving direct sales cosmetics firm, but I was not prepared for the level of energy and enthusiasm that greeted me. I had never before been in a room with so many happy and excited people. After a few individuals shared emotional stories of how they had overcome personal challenges to become successful, the evening progressed to recognizing individuals and teams for their various accomplishments. It seemed that no achievement was too small to celebrate. Women went on stage to receive pins, ribbons, and in some cases jewelry. More importantly they received recognition for their achievements from their peers. Every woman was introduced by name to the applause and cheers of the crowd and for some it was a very emotional experience; you might have thought that they had just won an Oscar or the Miss World contest. The enthusiasm was contagious and these women were clearly having fun and loving every minute of it. There was a real sense that this was a room full of winners. As a somewhat reserved Englishman, I was overwhelmed by it all. It was loud, emotional, and in a word 'hokey' ... and it clearly worked. I was intrigued and couldn't help wondering why more firms didn't do this.

We've know about positive reinforcement since the 1930s when B.F.Skinner was teaching rats to navigate mazes. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman discussed the concept extensively in their classic book In Search of Excellence. Rewarding good behavior using positive reinforcement has been proven to be dramatically more effective than punishing bad behavior using negative reinforcement. Without using positive reinforcement, it is unlikely that any business can unlock the full potential of their people. However, many firms are afraid of using it because it feels uncomfortable for managers used to dealing with spreadsheets rather than people. Other businesses try and then fail because they do not use positive reinforcement appropriately or consistently. For positive reinforcement to be effective, feedback must be:

- Specific (highlighting the behavior being rewarded)
- Earned (people know when you're being disingenuous)
- Unconditional (no if, and or but) 
- Appropriate (not everything is reinforcing to everyone)
- Immediate (the longer the delay, the less the impact)
- Frequent (to keep the behavior going)

Over the years I've seen a lot of businesses and without doubt the best run factory I ever visited was a brewery in Brazil. They too were masters of using positive reinforcement. Performance boards were displayed prominently showing actual versus target performance for each team. All employees participated in an easy to understand bonus scheme and a horn sounded every hour if they were on target for the monthly bonus payment. Each month, all of the employees assembled in the cafeteria to review performance and progress towards the bonus target. Teams from each area went on stage to review their performance and share their target for the coming month. There was a sense of good natured competition between each team and the one with the best performance received a trophy. Throughout the event people clapped and cheered and were clearly having fun.

You might feel uncomfortable with this approach and think that it wouldn't fit the buttoned-down culture of your business. Perhaps, but you would be missing out on a powerful technique to motivate your people and maybe have some fun along the way.