Chapter 8
Unresolved Roles
When we were kids, we didn't
worry about roles and responsibilities. We swarmed through the neighborhood,
doing what we pleased, or what we were told until we got distracted and did
something else. We were an army without ranks, a tribe of generalists, a
corporation without job titles -- a non-hierarchical, de-layered,
super-flattened, inverted-pyramid, matrix/cluster mob. And we liked it.
Fast-forward to the pre-team era,
the 60s and 70s, and the workplace was lousy with roles. Every worker had a job
description. Every job description described exactly what workers' tasks, roles
and working relationships were. Both, as a rule, were defined quite narrowly --
second level lab technician, plastics, assistant to first level lab technician,
plastics.
But in the team era of the 90s,
job descriptions have become less precise, broader. Roles are hardly mentioned
on paper. But these roles and relationships, whether committed to print or not,
play important roles in successful teaming.
Implicit in the idea of teams is
that people are adults. We're too
grown up for the pigeonholing of conventional job descriptions and scientific
management. But many teams, in their new freedom, have reverted to swarming
through the neighborhood. They are doing what they want to do, or what they are
good at. Important but less desirable work is not getting done.
Somehow, team members must have
three conditions in effect:
1)
all members must know the task they must complete...
2)
without those roles and responsibilities becoming
straightjackets, and cutting off circulation to the brain...
3)
while making sure that all necessary work gets done, including
the scutwork, which thinking people hate....
It is a tall and a paradoxical
order.
Hot potatoes
There are many tasks no one wants
to do. They are routine, or unpleasant, or they do not play to our strengths.
Paperwork is probably the number one item to avoid. Phone calls bother some
people. Evaluating people. Filing reports. Getting rid of the old grounds in
the coffee pot. Terrible things.
But -- they still have to be
done. The trouble occurs when team members refuse to handle these hot potatoes.
There are many variations on this
theme. People refuse tasks for different reasons. Their excuses are good ones:
ƒ "I'm
no good at that."
ƒ "I
did it last year."
ƒ "Don't
you remember what happened the last time I did that?"
ƒ "If
you make me do that, we won't be friends any more."
Managers and team leaders bend
over backwards to find some way to get these tasks done without forcing team
members to do them. They pass them on to resource team members, or farm it out
completely to third-party providers. Or they, too, turn their back on the
unpleasant tasks, and ignore the mounting negatives.
They are wrong to do this. The
right thing is to make everyone do their share.
Harvey once overheard a seasoned
professional having a woodshed talk with a raw recruit about what makes up a
good team member. He was saying, "Ya know, Jake, sometimes ya just gotta
suck it up and do things ya don't like."
No one wants to hear that, but
it's true. Everyone on a team must pull their fair share of scutwork if the
team is to succeed. Exempt some team members, but require it of the others, and
you have a two-tier team, which is a no-no.
The scutwork in any organization
tends to go undone except by a few people looking for martyr points. These
orphaned tasks, roles, responsibilities pile up and, after a while, start
screaming for attention. The emergency nature of these screams takes a team off
its measured plan, and forces them to stamp out the fire.
Like the auto oil filter
commercials used to say, "Pay me now, or pay me later." Let
unpleasant tasks go unassigned, and thus undone, and you will learn the true
meaning of unpleasant.
While we are on
the subject of hot potatoes, a word about a sickness afflicting some teams.
It is healthy to
want to avoid unpleasant tasks. And it is understandable to sigh with relief
when someone else gladly takes the assignment on. But beware.
Some people are
not so healthy, and faced with an unpleasant task, they will accept it,
thinking there is no alternative. These are the passive-nonaggressives -- the
zhlubs of the workplace who do whatever is asked of them, because their
self-esteem is so low they can't say no. Most passive-nonaggressives spent
their entire lives in this mode, allowing others to very slowly beat them to
death. We keep giving them work, and we may even think they like it in some
way, because they never complain, except perhaps with a nervous tic.
Good old Grace --
you can always count on her!
But here's the
problem. Passive nonaggressiveness is not always stable. One in ten
passive-nonaggressives undergoes a change of heart at some point in their
lives. They pivot dramatically from passive nonaggressiveness to the opposite
-- active aggressiveness. We call this the Robbins-Finley Flip Switch. (No one
else does.)
Usually they flip
the switch at home, with abusive results. But with teams becoming like another
family for many members, the Flip Switch happens at work as well.
In 1998, 1,400
people were killed in workplace violence. Every week, 18,000 people are
assaulted on the job. The violence was far more often visited upon peers and
team members, not on bosses. Risk management statisticians pegged the cost of
workplace violence that year at $42 billion. How about that?
Many of the
issues in this book, left unaddressed, can lead to this type of tragedy. But
the remark police most often elicit from runamok team members is "I was
tired of taking their shit."
Think about that
next time you dump weekend work on Grace.
The solution? Be
honest as a team. Identify tasks that no one in their right mind wants to do.
And rotate them accordingly. Everyone gets a turn at the wheelbarrow.
Problems also occur when more
than one person on a team has responsibility for a single (usually appealing)
task. A classic example of this is senior management teams that are not a team
at all, because the ambitions of individual members are superseding the team
mission. The result: turf wars. Both parties perceive a task is their turf, and
are prepared to violate the spirit of collaboration to ensure the turf remains
theirs.
People will fight over just about
anything, if they are convinced the turf in question represents power for them,
or if they perceive they are painted into a corner: members of a public
relations firm fighting one another to maintain control of an account;
co-leaders of a workteam doing battle over who keeps the books, or has access
to the team sponsor; members of an otherwise purely collaborative effort coming
to blows over whose name appears first on the final report.
Both hot potatoes and turf wars
spell disaster for team success. Effective teams recognize these potentials,
plan for them, and communicate more often when confronted with these occurring.
In the case of hot potatoes,
rotating the scutwork through all team members (even the most senior) sends a
clear message of "pulling your team load." On this team, everyone does the dishes. Be careful,
however: perhaps no one wants to take on the hot potato because no one is
really qualified to do the task -- bookkeeping, say. When there is a genuine
gap in team talent, you have to recruit someone else to do the work, if only on
a short-term basis.
When turf wars occur, openly
negotiate specific tasks. How you communicate content, and how you agree on
procedures for updating, linking, collaborating and accountability are crucial.
Remind people that great teams
are cross-functional in design. As in war, team members back one another up.
Cross-trained people have primary and secondary roles. If one soldier goes down
(with another task, or with the flu), another soldier steps forward and fills
in.
Remember to ask this critical
question periodically:
Who's responsible for what, by when,
and how are we going to check with each other
to make sure we're still on track?
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