Three:
Managers Build Institutional Wealth

This proposition stands in the place of the old maxim: “Managers Generate Efficiency and Profits.”

With new organizational forms, information processing systems that automate much management work, an educated workforce, and a continuous process improvement capability, small self-managed teams no longer need supervisors and managers to achieve peak performance.

This offering does not advocate the abolition of managerial work, rather its reinvention, so that it can make a far more valuable contribution to the enterprise. The new management work should be assuring the company’s owners that the knowledge capital of the enterprise is:

• Inventoried: known and accounted for
• Utilized and optimized in innovative ways across traditional lines
• Secured within the company (outside of employees’ heads), where it can be used by lots of people
• Growing. If knowledge capital can, indeed, be leveraged into revenues and profit, then expanding that capital should be paramount. And managers are in the right place (with most of the skills) to do just that.

The above commission redeploys current skills that most capable managers now possess. But it takes the “boss” out of the role of managing.

The skills required to grow a company’s knowledge capital are more than just technical; they are social as well, and this work requires a real rapport with people. As is true with much traditional management work, the people responsible for doing the organization’s real work each day may believe that the constant collection of knowledge capital does little more than interfere with their performance.

Some people in obsolete supervisory or managerial jobs are less interested in systemic work, and would find this proposed mission boring. For former managers who are more energized by working directly with people, there’s another way to build the knowledge capital of the enterprise.

With all the magic and potential we’ve discovered in properly equipped, well-informed self-managed teams, our work at ChangeCraft has taught us that these teams tend to fall apart without a skilled and disciplined Team Coach. These coaches (who are not members of the team, but visit regularly) add focus, facilitate resolution of internal problems and work with team members to aggressively – and continually – develop each other’s skills and capabilities. It is this last contribution that seems to mark the difference between high-performance work teams and committees (Katzenbach & Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization, 1992).

Here’s a caveat, though. Experienced managers seem to have difficulty making the transition from being “boss” to being a servant and supporter of self-managed teams. The best coaches we have seen have been true peers who never worked as managers or supervisors.