There Is No ‘I’ in ‘Team’--and Maybe No Point, Either

Back in the 1980s, corporations seeking sure-fire ways to boost productivity and improve quality were beating a path to John Clifford’s consulting firm, wanting to know how to build self-managed work teams.

Today, many of those same corporations are again seeking out Clifford, this time wanting to know why their teams aren’t working.

“Now we are mostly doing cleanup actions,” said Clifford, vice president of General Systems Consulting Group in New Jersey. “We’re finding businesses moving more toward dealing with dysfunctional groups than work teams. They are asking for help in doing one-on-one counseling sessions with people who just can’t seem to work in teams.”

Often, Clifford said, executives “think they are a failure because they haven’t been able to make teams work.”

What went wrong? Back in the 1970s, when American corporations realized that global competition was here to stay, self-directed work teams became one of a group of so-called employee empowerment management tools meant to revolutionize the American workplace.

Teams were supposed to eliminate unnecessary layers of middle management, encourage creativity and promote idea sharing among employees and between departments.

On the surface, it seemed like a good idea. Instead of each employee in a department being answerable to a supervisor, he or she would become answerable to his or her peers. Decision making was shifted to workers, who were given specific goals to achieve and told to collectively devise a plan for achieving them. In some companies, teams even got involved in deciding such things as bonuses and merit raises.

Other companies organized interdepartmental teams designed to improve the flow of information between, say, engineers and the marketing department. Still others put together teams that were charged with performing a specific task in a short period, then were disbanded.

Anecdotal evidence from corporations that instituted teams--from auto assembly plants to financial service corporations--suggested that they produced spectacular results quickly.

And the belief that teams can do good things continues to spread through corporate America. Twenty years after self-managed work teams began to move from the realm of academic theory into the American workplace, the number of large corporations that have organized at least part of their work forces into teams continues to grow, said Susan Cohen, an associate research professor at USC’s Center for Effective Organizations.

A survey conducted by the center in 1995 concluded that two-thirds of big U.S. companies assign some workers to self-managed teams, Cohen said. Results from an update of that survey, now being conducted, are not yet available, she said, “but just by being out there in the field, I can tell you that the number continues to grow.”

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Despite the continuing interest in teams, Cohen said, the track record for their effectiveness is spotty.

Cohen said she recently reviewed the academic literature on teams published between 1990 and 1996 and found that, on average, when self-managed work teams have been installed, “the results were positive but not dramatic. You get modest improvements, on the average, in productivity and quality.

“People keep doing it because it is popular, a fad, a thing to do,” Cohen said. “But then they find that they run into problems because these things do require considerable care and feeding. Companies have to invest some resources in making them succeed.”

The biggest problem companies have in shaping effective teams, Clifford said, is defining what it is they want the teams to accomplish. The next-biggest problem is overcoming the inherent individualism of American culture.

“We have a very limited vocabulary for this whole issue of people working together in groups,” Clifford said. “We have one word, ‘teams,’ and we use it very loosely. When you ask people what they mean by the word, you’ll find a million different answers.”

Clifford said that in workshops he gives to executives interested in building workplace teams, he likes to use a sports analogy to describe the different kinds of teams a corporation can put together.

The “baseball team” is one composed of geographically dispersed members where everyone has a certain set position to play, there is no time limit on the game and, during parts of the game, some players do nothing. “They come together on an as-needed basis, at a time of crisis,” Clifford said.

The “football team” is one of hierarchies, subdivisions and subgroupings, where there is a head coach, assistant coaches and specialists assigned to sub-teams. They are integrated to achieve a common goal--winning--and proceed along a plan laid out in advance. That is the sort of team most typically found in Japanese corporations.

The “basketball team” is one where everyone’s role is interchangeable and fluid. “At the height of the action, it is spontaneous, creative, and each player has a total reliance on every other player. There is this wonderful ballet that goes on.”

The problem, Clifford said, is that too often, corporations think they want a basketball team’ when what they need is a football team or a baseball team.

“What we are preaching is: Look long and hard at what you’re trying to accomplish here,” he said.

Once a company decides on the kind of team it wants--a decision Clifford said should be based on the type of product being produced or marketed, the number of employees involved, the nature of their jobs and whether they are in close physical proximity or not--it needs to retrain employees steeped in the American belief that it is the individual who counts.

Employers have found it difficult to devise ways to reward team efforts and to promote team members in a way that keeps individuals motivated, Clifford said.

“We are not a nation that has ever awarded collectivism; we don’t know how,” he said. As a result, teams here seem to work best “when they are given ‘Mission: Impossible’ and told to do it,” he said. “What we are finding in American corporations is that if you get a highly functioning team that achieves success, then you allow them to continue, they turn in on themselves, they become dysfunctional, then mourn the days when things were better.”

But given the increasing globalization of markets and international competition, American business is certain to keep trying to make teams work rather than abandoning the concept altogether, said Clifford and other specialists.

The real key, said Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Peffer, lies in U.S. corporate managers learning to hand over power to self-managed teams.

“The fact is, the people doing the work know better how to do it,” said Peffer, who also conducts executive workshops on self-managed teams. “Get the managers out of the way and you will do better.”