Team building has been a mainstay of organization development exercises for years now. Most larger organizations, including libraries, have at least tried combining staff into collaborations, on the assumption that a team will be more productive than an individual employee. Technology companies in particular make extensive use of collaborative teams because it’s felt that teams are more innovative. Now there is a growing awareness that while we think we know quite a bit about managing and nurturing individual workers, we know very little about how they function in teams or non-traditional work cultures. Here is a sampling of recent thoughts about the nature of work.
- What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team (New York Times Magazine | Charles Duhigg) “What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘good’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.”
- 3 messages from the workplace of the future (Huffington Post | Great Work Cultures) “The common belief that managers are responsible for ‘their’ employees’ motivation is a perfect defense, because each side can blame the other when things go wrong. Employee engagement surveys typically describe most employees as disengaged, while blaming managers. What if organizations took the road less traveled, let everyone be fully accountable for managing him or herself, and then got out of the way? Goodbye, conspiracy of blame. When there are no bosses, there is no one else to blame. When there is only work and people that do work, people are transparently accountable for their own individual decisions and actions.”
- Zappos founder says his self-management experiment only cost him a tenth of his staff (ReadWrite | Gregory Ferenstein) [Interview with Tony Hsieh] “The default future for companies under the traditional structure is death. Something like 88% of the companies that were on the Fortune 500 list in 1955 are no longer on that list. The simple fact is that command-and-control structures do not stand the test of time, but self-organized and self-managed structures (such as cities) are resilient and do stand the test of time. In addition, research has shown that every time the size of a city doubles, innovation or productivity per resident increases by 15%. But with traditional companies, the opposite happens — innovation or productivity per employee generally goes down. Holacracy just happens to be the technology that we are using today, but our ultimate goal is that we want to structure Zappos more like a city and less like a top-down bureaucratic command and control organization.”
- Collaborative overload (Harvard Business Review | Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant) “The exhibit ‘In Demand, Yet Disengaged,’ reflecting data on business unit line leaders across a sample of 20 organizations, illustrates the problem. People at the top center and right of the chart—that is, those seen as the best sources of information and in highest demand as collaborators in their companies—have the lowest engagement and career satisfaction scores, as represented by the size of their bubbles. Our research shows that this ultimately results in their either leaving their organizations (taking valuable knowledge and network resources with them) or staying and spreading their growing apathy to their colleagues.”
Articles from Ohio Web Library:
- Are bosses necessary? (Atlantic, Oct. 2015, p.28-32 | Jerry Useem)
- First, let’s get rid of all the bosses. (New Republic, Nov. 2015, p.26-39 | Roger D. Hodge)
- The future is bossless. (Business Week, 7/13/2015, p.63 | Rebecca Greenfield)
