Cisco And The True Meaning Of Teams

Rosabeth Moss Kanter has an interesting article on the HBR blog describing how Cisco is dismantling its unique structure of councils and boards to reduce bureaucracy. She suggests that this "presents a cautionary tale and an insight into the true meaning of teamwork and collaboration in organizations."

Kanter argues:

Cisco's councils and boards — a language that already suggests committees rather than goal-oriented projects — were supposed to speed things up and stimulate more innovation by creating cross-functional groups that could generate ideas about market-facing, solutions-oriented projects and organize across the organization to get them done.

Division of labor

While I share Kanter's concerns about the heavy overlapping structure of Cisco's councils and boards, I am less sure about Kanter's conclusions on "the true meaning of teamwork and collaboration". She writes:

"A small work group I observed recently heard the word teamwork and thought it meant that everyone should be in on everything, and everyone should discuss everything before anyone did anything. This produced wasted time, lack of clear accountability, and balls dropped all over the place, as some people shifted work to others because "it's a team effort" or simply assumed someone else was doing something. The group got back on track when the division of labor was clearly established — who performed what role and why; there was a mechanism for dealing with the overlaps; and the number of meetings was reduced. As each successive project was undertaken, differentiated roles and responsibilities were elaborated again….

"Winning teams combine specialized roles, in which players have deep expertise that they continue to refine through practice, with knowledge of others' roles and how to support them. They have the flexibility to mobilize fast for particular plays, guided by a common strategy, but each person has clear accountability for his or her performance in the service of the team."

What Kanter is describing here does not go beyond a well-run bureaucracy, like an NFL football team. Every player his role, as determined by the coach. The output of the team is the sum of the individual performances.

This is obviously more productive than anarchy, but ultimately it's still a hierarchical bureaucracy: it lacks the agility and innovativeness that is widely required in the modern workplace.

Self-organizing teams

As Kent Beck has noted in an earlier post here, in intellectual work it's not as good as self-organizing teams that go beyond individuals who have specifically defined responsibilities and who are reporting to "bosses". In self-organizing teams, each individual is thinking, not about how good a job he or she can do, but rather, how good a job are we doing? The implications of that are sometime unattractive. This means that sometimes an individual may need to do less than what that individual thinks is the very best in order for the team to achieve more. So if the individual knows an esoteric technique that is objectively the best, but the rest of the team doesn't understand it, that individual may need to set aside that technique so that the team as a whole can produce more. Individuals have a tendency to optimize their own performance.  Team vision and discipline goes beyond that to discover how are we going to make the most progress together.

Missing in action: the customer

A deeper problem in Kanter's articulation of "the real meaning of teamwork" is the noticeable absence of any mention of the customers. Given the epochal shift in the balance of power in the marketplace from seller to buyer, the customer is now effectively "the boss". If every team isn't totally focused on providing a continuous stream of added value to the customers and delivering it sooner, the firm is in trouble. The role of the manager becomes one of the enabling the team to deliver to the customer, giving the team a clear line of sight to the customer and removing impediments that might be getting in the team's way.

The methodology for non-bureaucratic ways of coordinating work so as to generate increasing value to customers, with both continuous innovation and disciplined execution, is now well-known and might be called  dynamic linking. The principal components of "dynamic linking" are: (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the management sets the goals of work in the cycle, based on what is known about what might delight the client; (c) decisions about how the work is to be carried out to achieve those goals are largely the responsibility of those doing the work; (d) progress is measured (to the extent possible) by direct client feedback at the end of each cycle.

The alternative to hierarchy and anarchy

A pervasive idea in 20^th Century management theology was that there were only two alternatives: hierarchy or anarchy. We don't want anarchy. So we are stuck with hierarchy. It's not pleasant. It's not fun. But that's the only way to run an efficient organization.

Saying that hierarchical bureaucracy is necessary is like arguing for smoking cigarettes. Hierarchies are a harmful habit that we need to break. We may be addicted to them, so that breaking the habit is hard, but the way forward is clear.

There is another way: dynamic linking. One can mesh the efforts of autonomous teams of knowledge workers who have the agility to innovate and meet the shifting needs of clients while also achieving disciplined execution. The method began in automotive design in Japan and has been developed most fully in software development with approaches known as "Agile" or "Scrum".

As The Power of Pull points out, the firm proceeds "by setting things up in short, consecutive waves of effort, iterations that foster deep, trust-based relationships among the participants… Knowledge begins to flow and team begins to learn, innovate and perform better and faster.… Rather than trying to specify the activities in the processes in great detail.., specify what they want to come out of the process, providing more space for individual participants to experiment, improvise and innovate."

It's not hierarchy and it's not anarchy. It gets the best of all worlds. It has the decisiveness of a hierarchy but without its inflexibility, its rigidity and its tendency to demotivate workers and frustrate customers. It creates an environment that is radically more productive for the organization, more congenial to innovation, and more satisfying both for those doing the work and those for whom the work is done.

It's been implemented for over fifteen years in organizations large and small. It underlies the dazzling success of firms like Salesforce.com [CRM], which achieved 41% return to shareholders over a sustained period.

It's discussed in detail in chapters 6 and 7 of The Leader's Guide to Radical Management , along with the specific practices needed to make it operational.

Worth a try.

Thanks to Steve Denning / Blogs Forbes