Ls week5

SALEH ALOTHMAN Week 5: Facilitating a team during its growing pains Word Count: 580 Team empowerment The problem that I have identified to discuss here is related to team facilitating. Organized teams lead to greater productivity and this can be achieved through team empowerment. My opinion is that teams need facilitators to be successful in the current business environment. This is because facilitators apart from being organizers and communicators also specialize in group dynamics. They encourage the team throughout the project in the stages of planning and are also involved in organizing, disciplining, monitoring the team.
Within my organization, team empowerment is not adopted. The employees follow the instructions relayed by the managers and there is very little participation as a team. The team members do not have an intricate caring for the task and this results in reduced performance throughput from the team as a whole. The traditional heroic model of leadership is followed and the leadership authority resides with individuals, based on their level of hierarchy.
Why team empowerment is important
Being a manager I understand the need to make the employees in the team perform with an intrinsic caring for their tasks. Team empowerment is defined as increased motivation in the team at performing a task due to team members’ collective, positive assessments of their relationship to tasks within the organization (Kirkman, Rosen, 2000). As the motivation factor lacks in the organization the effort put into the task by the team is low, resulting in poor performance.
Self leadership has been defined as “ the influence we exert on ourselves to achieve self motivation and self-direction we need to perform” (Manz and Sims, 1991, pg. 23). Self leadership qualities are a must with the team leaders and managers. As the leaders a majority of them in my organization lack these leadership skills the teams fail to succeed. The expectations are unclear, the roles and responsibilities of the team members are not elaborate and this results in missed deadlines and duplication of effort. There is poor communication within the teams and the teams are not well organized due to lack of self leadership qualities amongst the leaders.
Organizations are now increasingly facing high levels of dynamic, complex changes and environmental uncertainties (Champy, Nohria, 1997). In my organization the lack of efficient facilitators has resulted in poor role clarity and poor understanding of the organizations objectives. There are numerous conflicts within the organization and the conflict resolution process has to be handled better.
Possible solutions to the team empowerment problem
I have discussed about employee empowerment in the previous discussion. Team empowernment is integral to the success of the organization and this is possible only by an innovative and skilled facilitator. I suggest implementing the role of the team facilitator as a person involved in the improvement of the team. Facilitation can be done making use of the task behaviour which is involved with individual members’ role within the group and the operation of the team as a whole and the maintenance behaviour which deals with providing support and encouragement to the group members by facilitating their interaction and involving them in decision making (Raelin, 2003).
The facilitator must be flexible enough to form self directed work teams which seek to empower people and give them a greater control over their work (fisher, 2000). The team has to be made up in such a manner that they can decide on who should perform which task, according to their individual capability. Team empowerment will result in a high performing team and thus lead to organizational success.
References
Champy. J, Nohria. N. (1997). “ Fast Forward: The best ideas on managing business change”. Boston: Harvard business school press
Joseph A. Raelin. (2003).“ Creating leaderful organizations: how to bring out leadership in everyone”. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Kimball Fischer. (2000).“ Leading self-directed work teams: a guide to developing new team leadership”. The McGraw Hill companies.
Kirkman B. L., Rosen B. (2000). “ Powering up teams, organizational dynamics”. Pg 48-66.
Manz CC, Sims HP Jr. (1991). “ Superleadership: Beyond the myth of heroic Leadership”. Organ. Dynamics, pg. 18-35.