[OSList] "Building Self-Management Muscles"

[Harrison via OSList]

Christine, I did have to chuckle. You said: “....some teams with supervisors, depending on their level of development according to some collectively created criteria.” I couldn’t help but wonder. “Who’s development?” Would that be the “teams” or the “supervisors” 

 

Some years ago, one V.S. Mahesh – VP for Human Resources at the  Taj Hotel Group, a part of the TATA family of businesses... with literally 1000’s of employees in all sorts of groups. For the record, Taj Hotels are known worldwide for superb service, even today, and I believe a large part of that is due to Mahesh. Anyhow, in an off comment, he said to me, “You know Harrison, all teams, work groups, call them what you may... are essentially self managed. Even under ideal circumstances something like 99.99% of client interactions take place outside of any possible supervision. That being the case, a “good” supervisor is one who enables people to work effectively in their “normal” situation – without any supervision.”

 

Might it be that self management is the norm, albeit the conventional wisdom clearly has a different opinion...

 

Harrison

 

 

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From: OSList [mailto:oslist-bounces at lists.openspacetech.org] On Behalf Of Christine Whitney Sanchez via OSList
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2015 11:23 PM
To: Open Space List
Subject: [OSList] "Building Self-Management Muscles"

 

Nice job, Kevin!  Take a look, everyone...http://www.huffingtonpost.com/great-work-cultures/building-self-management_b_7859320.html

 

Yesterday, I had a conversation with one of my long-time clients, the COO of a nonprofit org, who teaches nonprofit management at a couple of universities.  In her organization, they have a team-based culture that supports some self-managed teams and some teams with supervisors, depending on their level of development according to some collectively created criteria.  

 

She commented that in an organization with a relatively small number of paid staff (70 FTEs, 55 Seasonal Staff, 2,000 volunteers) one of the challenges of self-managed functional teams is how quickly they become silos.  From her perspective, self-managed cross-functional teams tend to spend too much time trying to understand what everyone does - these often don’t feel like teams but more like gaggles of loosely connected colleagues .  

 

I would love to hear stories from any of you in our global community about successful self-managed teams in nonprofit orgs or in any type of org with under 100 FTEs.

 

Warm wishes from a toasty Phoenix evening,


Christine

Christine Whitney Sanchez, M.C.

Phoenix, AZ, USA • +1.480.759.0262
www.innovationpartners.com 

www.christinewhitneysanchez.com
 
Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/ChristineWhitneySanchez>  | LinkedIn <https://www.linkedin.com/in/christinewhitneysanchez>  | Twitter <https://twitter.com/CWhitneySanchez>  



 

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