Chapter 7
Uncertain Boundaries
Between the last two chapters, on goal
setting and decision making, is an enormous crevasse, into which teams fall,
fester, and stink up the joint. It is the area of boundary management – or in
the case of team failure, mismanagement.
Empowerment is a form of decision
making not mentioned in the last chapter because it involves individual, not
team decisions. Yet it is probably the most important kind of deciding that
occurs on empowered teams.
Here's the deal. Organizations
create teams to achieve certain goals. They may tell the teams, usually quite
vaguely, that they are "empowered" to some degree to do whatever is
necessary to achieve the goal.
Or they may not.
Either way, the team has been set
up to fall. Either the team feels it has no authority or leverage to carry out
its mission, or it is confused about what its authority or leverage really
amounts to.
It is deeply depressing to a team
to go to all the trouble of learning how to solve a problem, but then to be
paralyzed, unable to implement that solution, because it doesn’t know if it's
allowed to. Or worse, implements the wrong (but defensible) solution because it
doesn’t think management will go for the right (but ambitious) one.
On the other side of the coin, it
is terrifying for management to empower people to make decisions in advance
without any assurance that team members will make sensible or defensible
decisions. Many an empowered team, thinking its empowerment to be vast and
absolute, learns to its chagrin that its empowerment was really more of an
expression, a figure of speech, than a blank check.
Some managers "empower"
teams to be nice; when the team actually goes and does something on its own
recognizance, something different than the managers would have chosen, they
learn the high price of nice.
It is a drag on both sides when
managers believe they instructed a team to make decisions, only to find out
later the team didn’t believe a word of it. The team gets into trouble, which
was what it was trying to avoid, and now the manager has less reason to trust
the team than before.
Obviously, teams and managers need some
sort of arbitration, so that there are things teams can do to advance their
cause without breaching the larger organization's security.
So what is to be done?
First, write the word empowerment on a clean sheet of paper,
fold the sheet carefully into sixteenths, and then chuck it in the wastecan.
From now on, instead of empowerment,
think in terms of the phrase boundary
management. For there can be no empowering with defining what the power is,
who has it, where it starts, and where it ends.
Boundary management is a method for
negotiating and agreeing to a set of constraints or boundaries within which
team members are free to make decisions on their own. These boundaries will
vary depending on the degree of experience or expertise of each team member.
They also vary depending on the
relationship the team leader or manager has with each team member. If you are
confident about a team member's judgment or competence, you will give him or
her more latitude than someone that just walked in off the street.
The empowerment grid states explicitly
and concretely what each team member has authority to do. If an act is not
specified in the grid, the team member must consult with others before acting.
The Empowerment Grid
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RESOURCES
cash costs,
people costs
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QUANTITY
for group of 120 customers
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OBJECTIVE
Create a training workshop
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SCHEDULE
June 1-21
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QUALITY
Professional quality – this is
for outside consumption!
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The most common parameters or
constraints around which boundaries are created are resources, schedule,
quantity, and quality.
The team leader fills in the center
square – the objective the team must
accomplish. In our example, the team task is to create a training workshop. The
objective in the center of the grid is usually non-negotiable: you gotta do it.
Question is, and the other boxes provide the answers, how you gonna do it?
Now the leader creates a target for each of the constraints, as a
starting point for the negotiation. Under resources, you may put down a cash
budget of $5,000, plus a week's time from two team members.
For schedule, you may enter a start date of June 1 and a completion
date of June 21.
The quantity dimension is straightforward enough – how big a project is
it?
The quality constraint may take a bit longer to negotiate since it's,
well, qualitative. Here you try to describe what the outcome should look like
in, as much detail as possible. Everyone must put into words his or her
as-yet-inarticulated vision of what the project will be like.
For example, what outcome do you
expect for the workshop – more efficient work processes? You should also
describe in some detail what the work will look and feel like. Will it be a
professional-quality slideshow, enhanced by outside subcontractors? A simpler
in-house PowerPoint job? Or will typewritten handouts be good enough?
Be specific here. Give both
positive and negative examples to help the team member understand what is
acceptable and what is not. For example, specify that if handouts are OK, they
can’t be smudged-over tenth-generation Xeroxes – at a bare minimum they must be
legible. If you take the slide presentation route, specify if custom photos
will be required, or if clip-art is good enough.
Before moving forward, the grid must
be negotiated with the team. Maybe the leader has miscalculated, or the team is
able to persuade him another way is better, or cheaper, or quicker, or more
appropriate.
For each constraint, the team
member and team leader negotiate the range within which the team member can
make independent decisions without having to go back and check with the leader.
The leader knows what's acceptable
as an outcome, the big picture. While team members will each have opinions
based on his or her closer-to-the-ground perspective.
For the resource constraint, for
example, the leader may recommend that at least $3,000 should be used – because
the team must spend that much to ensure refunding at the same level next year.
For that reason, one team member may want to push spending levels to $10,000 –
use it or lose it, right? And such a slideshow would be like butter.
But the leader may say no –
spending $10,000 for a presentation on corporate responsibility would rain
hellfire upon them all.
The beauty of the empowerment grid
is that as things change, as they will, you are forced to go back and check the
validity of all of the constraints. It's like a project compass, to keep you
from veering the wrong way due to some fuzzy notion of empowerment., and
sailing off the edge of the map.
The point is that before going any
farther, team members know quite precisely what lengths they may go to without
having to ask for permission. This saves time, reduces frustration, restores
confidence and calm, and eliminates the thing we most dread on teams –
surprises.
![[IMAGE]](http://mfinley.com/gif/new-teams-cover.jpg)
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