Team

Performance Exploding the myths of high

Management
4,7
performance teams
Richard Davis
306 Vanguard Consulting Ltd, Buckingham, UK

Introduction
A computer services call centre decided that it should create a self-managed
team culture. They allocated people to five-person teams and sent everyone on
an empowerment course. The teams were told that their task was high
performance and that they should set their own targets (as long as these were
acceptable to management). The group of managers was left without any clear
purpose beyond compiling and justifying the budget and its subsequent
variance. They attended a weekly session on “how to lead self-managed teams”
which became little more than unfocused therapy for them.
This is a blunt description but it embodies all the assumptions that we have
seen in many other such examples. The results, of course, were very poor. The
teams did not perform well and felt that the managers were abdicating their
responsibilities. A pure blame culture evolved and eventually things were
returned to their previous “managed” state.
It was a failure of thinking. The assumptions that underlay the “command
and control” thinking that typified the organisation remained unchallenged and
so undermined the very things that they were trying to change.
Creating high performance teams should be, and is, a fast and sustainable
process if done the right way. The author uses a case study from a loss
adjuster’s operation to demonstrate just how simple it can be. In the narration
he explodes some of the more common and dreadfully pervasive myths that
bedevil managers’ thinking and push them into such ineffective activity. The
command and control tradition from which these myths stem must be seen for
what it is before any true change can take place.

Myth: high performance teams means culture change

Team Performance Management,
Vol. 4 No. 7, 1998, pp. 306-311.
© MCB University Press, 1352-7592
This is true but in a very different sense from that which is usually meant.
Managers start with the belief that they must change the culture of the team
members. The reality is that the front line people themselves can not wait to
work differently – it is the managers who must change their culture. Deming
and Juran proved over and over again, from the 1950s onwards, that the system
in which people work has the primary influence on performance. Managers
have designed that work system. They have decided, knowingly or otherwise,
the way the organisation is structured, the way people are measured, what
managers pay attention to, how managers spend their time, the support that
operators do or do not receive and how priorities are determined. This amalgam
of conditions either enables or disables people’s ability to do good work. What
individuals bring to the party is relatively insignificant by comparison. Exploding the
Managers collectively operate to a set of assumptions about organisations and myths
people, and these assumptions drive the design of the system. Unless managers
understand how the system that they have designed drives performance, they
will never know how to improve team performance.
The loss adjusters created a system that was designed to meet the service
standards set them by the insurance companies. The standards were that policy 307
holders had to be contacted within 24 hours, visited within four days and a
preliminary report submitted to the insurance company within eight days. In
order to process the claims more effectively, and to help the insurers, a central
department was set up to receive the claims and distribute them to the
branches. A second function was set up to contact the policy holders and
organise the adjuster visits. The adjusters managed the claims and made use of
a team of typists in each branch to produce the reports.
The adjusters worked on a seniority basis, which in turn was driven by
qualifications. They did not move up the hierarchy unless they had passed their
exams and their status determined the work that they were allocated. Senior
adjusters were very jealous of their status and insisted on checking the work of
more junior adjusters.
Managers were aware that all four sections, claims receipt, appointments,
adjusters and typing, blamed each other for any failure (of which there were
many). When, however, managers attended review meetings with the insurers
and were criticised for the company’s performance, they responded by writing
memos to all branches urging them to do better.
In a state of some despair at the apparent inability of the branches to take
responsibility for their work, the managers decided that team building training
was going to be necessary, along with workshops to address their values and
attitudes. The question that we were asked to address was “how do we get them
to take responsibility?” Eventually, this is the question that all managers setting
up self-managed teams believe they must answer. None, in our experience has
realised that it the wrong question.
A simple analysis of the work flow showed that about 70 per cent of
everyone’s effort was pure waste. The instructions coming to the branch were
incomplete and often duplicated and visits were badly planned. Perhaps the
most important failure was that adjusters were on a treadmill of visiting policy
holders within the four days, very much aware that they would be rapped on the
knuckles for not meeting service standards. As a consequence, they were
visiting unprepared and seldom able to settle the claim. Most of the typing was
re-work or letters to explain delays. Ninety per cent of all calls received by
branches were unnecessary, being policy holders or insurers calling to check
progress. Managers had been measuring performance against service
standards and were totally unaware of this waste. The managers had been
controlling work by exhorting people to work better and harder and had
convinced themselves that the only reason for poor work had been an attitude
problem.
Team Imagine what the response would have been from the staff and what the
Performance results would have been from team building courses. Suppose that they had
Management instituted self-managed teams or introduced empowerment training? The staff
themselves were unaware of the problems yet believed that they were working
4,7 hard – and so they were, but not productively.
A specific example will serve to illustrate:
308 A typist had been in tears surrounded by two-foot high piles of files awaiting typing. She was
criticised for not turning the files round within the 24-hour standard by which she was
measured. We asked the manager to show us what was in the files. Fifty per cent were letters
that could have been handled with a telephone call (writing a letter was the easiest way the
adjuster could get the file off his/her desk and so meet the service standard). A further 40 per
cent were reports back for re-typing. The primary cause of the re-work was the correction
made by the manager when he checked the files. When asked what problems he found in the
files, he said, “carelessness”. He felt, therefore, that his checking activity was fully justified.
The adjusters were buried in their offices behind similar piles of corrected work for re-
checking and messages to call policy holders ringing to check progress. It was a vicious circle
of delay and re-work.
The solution was simple. First, adjusters were told to make telephone calls
instead of writing letters. Second, the manager asked the adjusters what they
needed to do to obviate his need to check the files. They replied, “nothing”. The
adjusters knew that he checked the files and, being busy themselves, relied on
him to find their errors. They had been perfectly capable of quality work.
Within a week, the typing had reduced by 80 per cent and only one in 20
reports came back for re-typing. The quality of the work rose dramatically and,
as the cases were closed more and more quickly, the telephone stopped ringing,
causing less distraction to the typists. The atmosphere in the office improved
rapidly, both from a work perspective, being a calmer place altogether, and from
a team perspective, with so much less failure and blame.
The typists had free time and began to help the adjusters prepare their cases.
The adjusters found that they were visiting more sites with correct paper work
and so settled more claims more quickly. There was now a virtuous circle of
improvement. There were still plenty of problems elsewhere but the
improvement in the branch had clarified them for what they were and thus
enabled managers to work together to make wider improvements.
This is entirely typical of our experience of organisations. Describing it in
such a simplified and obvious way may appear to exaggerate apparent
stupidities. The truth, however, is that this is commonplace and is due to
managers measuring the wrong things and being unaware of what drives
behaviour.
As a footnote, it is worth observing that the typists had been due to attend a
“customer care” programme to “fix” the poor attitude that they displayed to
callers. Given the appalling work that they had to endure, it is not surprising
that they were often less than totally charming on the telephone.
The lesson from this work is twofold. First, that the culture change involves
the managers – they must learn to think differently. Second, what they must
learn is that their thinking is responsible for how work is designed: the primary
condition for high performing teams is that the people have meaningful work to Exploding the
do and must be able to spend their time contributing, not coping with waste. myths
Managers must learn to trust their people
Three dangerous notions have been introduced to managers in recent years:
trust, empowerment and democracy. The front line people work in a system
created by the same wrong thinking as that of the managers. How can they 309
know to think differently? It is a mistake to believe that because they work with
customers they know best. They know some things but they do not know how
to think any differently. The loss adjusting teams were unaware of the waste;
they thought that it was “normal”. They viewed insurers as dinosaurs and
policy holders as often unreasonable. Should they have set up a system to
indulge that view of the world? Of course not. Democracy and empowerment
can work, but only with the conditions in place to allow people to take informed
decisions. Uninformed empowerment leads to frustration and bitter
recriminations on both sides. Managers feel caught in a vice of failure; failure to
handle people and failure to control.
The loss adjuster managers had to learn to spend their time differently and
they had to learn to think differently. They had been given the usual job of
managing budgets and people. Managing people meant setting targets and
incentives and promulgating procedures. The manager’s lament was “how do I
get them to do it?” To empower their staff would have been a cruelty to both
parties. They had to lead their way out of the problems.
Once the manager in the example above had understood that his view of the
world informed the way the branch worked, he had the basis to ask a very
different question, “what is stopping them doing it?” Having solved the basic
problems, productivity went up, as did service levels – cases were being settled
more quickly and with less work. The skill in the short term had been finding
something that they could stop doing that would free up time to work on the
other issues. He then needed to develop a very different way of spending time.
He realised that the problems were in the work and symbolically forsook his
office to take up a desk in the middle of the team. (There has been a trend
towards this in many offices but few managers realise the change in behaviour
that must accompany the move.) He set himself the task of tracking the
workflow. As he encountered problems he engaged the staff in experimenting
with better ways. He helped them develop measurement that would better
describe the work. By focusing on what mattered he communicated to them
what their true purpose had been, namely settling claims (not meeting service
standards).
His focus was:
• What types of work are coming in?
• How predictable are they?
• What response is needed?
Team • How well do we currently deliver?
Performance • What stops us delivering the right response?
Management He stayed with the people while they developed better solutions, contributing
4,7 his experience and knowledge. He found that he was helping them to learn from
each other and exchange expertise. This was a very significant team building
310 activity because it helped to demonstrate that everyone had a contribution to
make. Their previous view was that “everyone else is a problem, I’m OK”.
People learned to trust each other and seek help. They learned what everyone
else did. He showed them how the better work showed results in the
measurement. He learned what was wrong with the quality of the work coming
in and took action with other departments to improve it.
To us, as outsiders visiting once a week, the change was extraordinary. Most
evident was the energy, sense of purpose and look of reward on their faces.
They reported that they felt less busy and yet they were achieving hugely
improved productivity.
Managers need not abandon their common sense and somehow learn to trust
something that no one understands. They can learn to lead good work and trust
in knowledge and results. They cannot lead without understanding and they
cannot understand what they do not do – they must be there with the people
doing the work.

Myth: teams need targets and standards

The loss adjusting teams were spending most of their time on useless work.
What would have been the point of setting targets or standards? The people
themselves were not in control of the waste and therefore how could they set
their own targets any more meaningfully than a manager? Even in a perfect
work-flow, targets actually create under-performance. If the manager had
realised that the purpose had been to settle claims and had acted on it, he would
have set targets for faster settlement. The staff would then be encouraged to do
whatever they needed to, in order to meet the targets. This in fact happened in
some branches, where the managers did not grasp the new thinking. Staff
distorted the work, getting rid of difficult cases, cheating on the reports and
sacrificing quality for speed. They were not bad people, they were merely
coping with a stupid system. They were accused of being bad people and were
used as examples of how it really was an attitude problem all the time!
Managers had to learn that measurement was important but not targets. By
continuing to learn about the work, the manager helped people learn what to
measure. He kept them focused on “purpose” – happy insurers which, in turn,
meant policy holders whose claims had been settled well and fast. A good
measure was one that helped people understand how well they met purpose. By
seeing what improvement could be made and then seeing how it reflected in the
numbers, he was able to keep asking how much better it could be if more of the
same were done. Targets became goals based on knowledge of better methods.
In other words, the staff could see what they had done to create better
performance and then were asked by the manager to define what might be Exploding the
possible if more improvements were made. This was a de facto target but the myths
people had knowledge and control over the improvements. They would not have
had that knowledge and control without the manager’s leadership.
As the work progressed, the manager’s role became more collegiate and
people took responsibility for their own work. A landmark event took place
some two months into the work. The manager had been very frustrated, asking 311
people to volunteer to help and getting no response. People needed time to
adjust to their ability to contribute and to their knowledge the fact that everyone
else was contributing also. The manager was taken aback, then, to have
someone approach him asking him if he still needed help. He discovered that
they were also starting to fix problems without coming to him. He also learned
that while he had been the “checker of work” no one came to him for advice. As
he became the enabler of good work, people learned to involve him for his
expertise.

Summary
High performance teams do represent a change in culture in the sense that
managers must change the way that they think and spend their time. If they do,
they can create extraordinary and lasting change in no time at all. We can also
report that the managers who have learned to work this way tend to go home on
time and enjoy their work.