Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [53]
Managers at the York plant had planned to impose a team-based work system along the lines of those used at Toyota and some other top manufacturers. But as the unions at the York plant were aware, there is a long list of companies at which this approach has been poorly implemented. Self-managed teams can succeed only if employees—along with their unions where they exist—and frontline managers have been involved from day one in implementing the work system instead of just being told to use it, as often happens in “how” companies.
Unsurprisingly, the union leaders weren’t happy.
Teerlink and his team listened. What’s more, they did their own review of the history of the practice, which revealed a paradox that other leadership teams might have overlooked: Executives in team-based companies almost never applied the approach to themselves, despite its supposed advantages. If “leaders by their actions are known,”14 as Teerlink likes to say, they weren’t exactly leading by example on the team-based approach.
WORKING IN CIRCLES
After their investigation, Teerlink and his team agreed with the union and sought to involve it and employees in building a team-based system. The group decided that fixed teams could become a handicap, with each team pursuing its own interests instead of the company’s. What Teerlink and his colleagues arrived at instead was what they called a “natural work group”: “Getting the right people to come together, to do the right work, and do it right.”15 Every word of that description was important. A natural work group would not be bound by lines of authority on an org chart or by divisional fiefs within the company. The right people were the people needed to get something done that needed doing, regardless of their place in the former hierarchy. And groups were not to be formed for their own sake, but because they were the natural way to do “the right work,” which was whatever needed to be done.
Logically, they decided to use this structure throughout the company, from the shop floor to the executive room. This concept of natural, or self-organizing, work groups is similar to one used at Gore, where two varieties of natural groups and their leaders exist: business—operating the business processes, such as manufacturing, sales, and so on; and functional—operating the support processes, such as training, development, and so on. Without knowing this, Teerlink and his group came to a similar composition of what they called a “circle structure” consisting of “create demand,” “produce product,” and “provide support” circles.
Each circle was a cross-functional, large, natural work group with a common purpose, all intersecting in a venn diagram. It was not clear how the circles would be organized, and the group decided that it would need wise and competent counsel. From this, the most dramatic and symbolically significant executives’ decision emerged: Totally voluntarily, Tom Gelb, the executive vice president of manufacturing, and Jim Paterson, who had earlier asked, for personal reasons, to move from the motorcycle division presidency to be executive vice president of marketing, agreed to resign and become coaches of their respective circles with no hierarchical “Indian chief” power whatsoever. Teerlink, the acting president of the division, became the coach of the “provide support” circle. To demonstrate that this reorganization wasn’t just another management fad that the people could wait out, two of Harley’s top three executives effectively gave up their jobs and the power that came with them to put the structure into practice. And within a few months, Teerlink would follow them.
Between mid-1991 and the end of 1992, Teerlink and his group started to discuss the new structure with others in the company. After the presentations, he’d ask, “What are the questions?”
“Who’s in charge of the circles?” was often the first.
The ambiguity, he explained, was deliberate. Teerlink wanted a structure that was a little nebulous, so it would evolve