A P O I N T O F V I E W

EAITIS NEED ITIORE THRII EnTHUSlRSITI TO SUCCEED

by Adam Gittler

A month ago, Ron, Margaret, Paul, and John finished their team-building skills training and were excited to begin cutting costs in their area. Their excitement gradually waned, how- evel; and their production team coach became frustrated by his inability to secure the resources they needed: information, time to meet, engineering expertise, and management’s attention. The plant manager had not told them how long the team would last, and they all silently wished the team would end the next day. They each earnestly wanted their team to succeed, so why couldn’t it?

Before a company or organization can implement a team-oriented structure among its pro- duction personnel, management must institute policies and systems to ensure its teams’ success. These systems and policies are management’s obligations toward its teams. Without them, the teams can be expected to fail.

W. Edwards Deming believed that the environment surrounding an employee affects that employee’s performance as much as the employee’s ambition and energy. In a team, team mem- bers’ success depends on their ambitions and energy, as well as on the managerial systems continually supporting the team. Thus, a team’s success depends equally on:

Internal factors: the team members and their interactions. External factors: management systems supporting the team.

Internal factors are elements that a team can control; external factors reside with manage- ment, outside a team’s control. If managers look only at one set of factors, their team structure precludes success. If management implements supporting systems and structures, its teams’ successes depend on team members and their interactions.

There are five elements that managers must provide to fulfill their obligations to their teams. Implementing one without the others is insufficient; ideally, management should view them as codependent components comprising a full commitment to team success. Each of these factors requires endless management vigilance; if management does not watch over its teams, their minor problems will fester and destroy the team effort.

1. Sufficient Time for Action-Teams exist beyond the boundaries of one member’s shift, function, or work area. The organization must dedicate time for all team members to convene and exclusively discuss their suggestions. The amount of time required for dedicated discussion must complement the rate at which the team generates ideas. If teams are not able to meet often enough to implement the ideas they generate, then the impact of the team will be diminished.

What amount of time is sufficient? This answer depends on the rate at which the team generates ideas. A team that develops several ideas per week ought to meet each week; a team

* * * Adam Gittler is an industrial/quality engineer in the global personal computer division ofAMP in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has worked with and led improvement teams in assembly, forming, stamping, molding, plating, and diecasting operations.

NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY REVIEW I Summer 1997 0 I997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

I

CCC 0277-85561971160300l-04

2 Adam Giftler

that develops a single idea each month ought to meet once per month (unless ideas are effec- tively generated by a facilitator during meetings). The consequences of ignoring a team’s idea generation rate include lost time, production, and wages and the expensive death of potential improvements. If team members meet each week but discuss irrelevant trivialities, then their time (and the company’s resources) are underutilized during their meetings. If team members meet once a month but generate ideas weekly or daily, either the monthly meetings do not offer sufficient time for discussion or enthusiasm for ideas has waned by the time of the meeting.

Each team in an organization is likely to generate ideas at different rates. Therefore, imple- menting a single meeting schedule for all teams will inherently waste time or potential. One possible solution: Allow teams to choose their own meeting times and durations. But do not expect these meetings to occur at set schedules. Some may occur on Monday at 10 P.M., some on Wednesday at 3 P.M.; some may last an hour, some for ten minutes. Management must trust teams to use this freedom productively. To remedy any mistrust, management can set upper limits with teams regarding how much time they can consume. But management must under- stand beforehand the difference between meetings’ frequency and duration. In other words, ten minutes per day may be more effective than 50 minutes per week. Also note that a new team is more likely to generate ideas than a mature team; the meeting schedule must reflect and exploit this fact.

2. A Capable Facilitator-Management must provide each team with a capable facilitator to ensure long-term success. An incompetent facilitator can destroy a team’s best intentions by creating an unreasonable environment. The facilitator’s primary job is to speed up the pace of improvement. He or she may also provide the team with information necessary to succeed and prevent and eliminate discord.

An effective facilitator’s most important skill-speeding up the pace of improvement- cannot be taught. A single course on facilitating will not necessarily transform an engineer, foreperson, or manager into an adequate facilitator. Furthermore, a facilitator does not need to be an employee from outside the team; a facilitator can simply be an existing team member.

A facilitator must earn the team’s respect. Respect allows a facilitator to make decisions for the sake of improvement and run meetings effectively for the benefit of the team, without intro- ducing tension or animosity. A facilitator must respect team members as well. A humble facili- tator truly believes he or she is workingfor the team, rather than that team members are working for him. If a facilitator is new to a team or the production environment, he or she must make an even greater effort to respect team members because they have the knowledge needed for im- provement. Mutual respect leads to more productive environments where improvements are more attainable.

The facilitator must help generate and implement the team’s ideas. Two impediments that the facilitator must help the team overcome are collective mental laziness and collective indeci- siveness. A team that has knowledge but cannot generate it into ideas is an ineffective team. A facilitator must somehow turn that knowledge into ideas. In certain team environments, mem- bers assume another team member will think of suggestions for improvement. As Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.” If enough team members submit to mental laziness, the team will stall quickly; meetings become a waste of time, wages, and productivity. Once a team stalls, it is up to management to intervene. Tools for eliminating mental laziness include brainstorming, cause-and-effect diagrams, unde- sirable effects diagrams, and the simple method of continually asking each team member “how?’ and “why?’

A team that generates ideas but does not implement them is still an ineffective team. The facilitator must make sure that worthwhile ideas are implemented by preventing collective inde- cisiveness. Regardless of an implementation’s low cost or difficulty, teams can remain noncom- mittal for weeks and even months. In such cases, nobody wants to assume final responsibility for the method of implementation or a possible failure. At this point, the facilitator must step forward and compel the team to commit to an implementation plan and decision. Certainly, a facilitator should not rush this step for projects with heavy capital investment, but the facilitator

NATIONAL PRODUCTlVliY REVIEW / Summer I997

A Point of Kew 3

must bring the team to the point of action. If an idea has a “free” implementation, like a policy or data collection, the eventual implemented method is not final or permanent. The team can revisit the methods to improve the idea. In other words, the risk of failure should not be confused with the fear of failure. When possible, implement the idea, then improve on it. Invariably, we spend more time dealing with the results of our decisions than making them, so we should minimize the decision time and maximize the improvement time, but not forsake proper plan- ning in doing so.

Collective mental laziness and indecisiveness reduce a team’s efforts to wasteful stress. A facilitator that does not remedy these problems is not a facilitator, but an ineffective team mem- ber. For team efforts to positively affect the bottom line, management must:

Pick facilitators strategically and not haphazardly. Monitor the teams’ progress and idea generation rate.

3. Accountable Goals-Management cannot initiate teams without setting forth goals. These goals should align with corporate or departmental goals. A team without a goal cannot measure to what extent it is improving, and neither can management. Thus, a team without such a barom- eter may not feel compelled to improve quickly or at all. Moreover, it may unintentionally create local optimums that negatively affect the organization.

In The Invisible Production Line, Daniel Stamp writes, “If we delegate responsibility to someone, we must also delegate the authority needed to meet that responsibility.” This tenet especially holds true for teams. If you define a goal for a team, ensure that the team also has the authority to implement solutions. If a team is not empowered to reach its goal, then management has demoralized the team members (and possibly other teams) and wasted wages, resources, and time.

If management has set a goal for a team and it reaches that goal, management must make one of two decisions: Set a new goal or disband the team. If managers lazily regard their teams’ performance, they will allow their teams to continue for a time without a goal or direction. Short-term goals, such as a specific project or problem, should exist only for a short time; long- term and ongoing goals, such as zero defects or consistent customer satisfaction, should exist for longer periods of time or indefinitely.

4. Cross-Functional Communication-Management must ensure that information that can affect a team’s operation is available and actively communicated. This information can come from any facet of the organization: management, engineering, other teams, or customers. Addi- tionally, information from different sources must be consistent. Teams that exist in an informa- tional vacuum will not reach their potential.

Without proper mutual communication among all facets of an organization, local optimums occur that can adversely affect financial performance, morale, and efficiency. For example, in one company, teams representing processes farther up the production line consistently improved themselves at the expense of downstream teams. After only eight weeks of existence, these teams’ improvements ravaged the delivery scheduling, throughput, and inventories of the team at the beginning of the production line. Simple communications would have prevented systemwide failures and detrimental local optimums.

Cross-functional teams are not always a necessary or effective team structure; however, cross-functional communication is ulwuys a necessary and effective team policy. Effective com- munication must at least match the pace of improvement; otherwise, local optimums and failed implementations will occur periodically. To implement cross-functional communication with- out implementing cross-functional teams:

Distribute team meeting minutes freely, rather than just to management. Invite guests from technical positions, management, and other teams to meetings. If these guests are needed for an action item during the meeting, handle their action items first so their time away from other work is minimized.

NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY REVIEW / Summer 1997

4 Adam Gitler

Hold regularly scheduled meetings with members from all existing teams to dissemi- nate information quickly and consistently. Create a bulletin board of all teams’ current projects, listing these projects by a title or descriptive phrase.

Team projects that create local optimums are a symptom of a larger problem: management not fulfilling its teams’ informational needs.

5. Technical and Administrative Support-Management must provide teams the resources they need to reach their goals. These resources may include the expertise of administrators, engineers, accountants, or anyone outside the team’s control. In these cases, management needs to follow through with its commitment to teams and ensure they receive the support they re- quire.

Management needs to intervene in cases where the external employee does not view the team’s need as an obligation. Management will have to convey the urgency of the request and possibly assign a completion date. If a team that needs a particular kind of expertise is unable to acquire this knowledge, its success is jeopardized, costs may rise, and the enthusiasm of team members may diminish.

Obligations in a team structure exist for all persons involved: managers, production em- ployees, engineers, and administrators. The success of a team-oriented personnel structure de- pends as much on management as it does on the team members. Are you setting up your teams to fail, or are you willing to implement systems to help them succeed for you?

Each team meeting is an investment in short-term losses (such as lost production) for long- term gains. Management must support its teams with policies, systems, and an underlying com- mitment to make these investments profitable.

Hard work is not its own reward. This principle certainly applies to any team effort. A team without internal strengths is destined to fail, but a strong team needs more than just enthusiasm to succeed.

NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY REVIEW / Summer I997