Manager Behaviors Led to Effective Self-Managed Teams

Researchers looked at which leadership techniques were most effective when overseeing a self-managing work team—one that handles the administrative duties performed for typical work groups by the manager. They developed case studies from a Fortune 500 company organized into 300 self-managed teams and compared the behaviors of effective leaders with those of average ones. "Effectiveness" was rated using objective team performance metrics, team member ratings, and supervisor ratings of the leader.

Superior leaders were found to serve as liaisons between the team and the company, rather than connecting themselves to either exclusively. They did this by:

• Relating to people in and outside of the team and "building political awareness" in both groups.
• Scouting information for each side about the other and tracking activities in and outside of their teams.
• Persuading the company and the team to pay attention to each others' needs.
• Empowering their teams.

Specific behaviors included:

• Relating
• • Find out and help meet the needs of your manager and colleagues in other departments.
  • Help team members with their individual needs, instead of considering this a burden.
• Scouting
• • Seek information helpful to the team from upper managers, peers and company experts.
  • Find and use a standard problem-solving approach to analyze problems.
• Persuading
• • Defend team decisions to upper management.
  • Rather than ordering the team to choose an option you prefer, try talking it into the decision, perhaps using data from outside the team such as the impact of a decision on the team itself.
• Empowering
• • Let, and make, the team make its own decisions, but only after giving it the same information, training, and resources you would want before making those decisions.
  • Stay out of the team's day-to-day activities.
  • Don't ignore individual performance problems just because the person's on a team—provide needed training and coaching.

Source: Druskat, V., and J. Wheeler (03), "Managing from the Boundary: The Effective Leadership of Self-Managing Work Teams," Academy of Management Journal 46(4):435.