THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 13, 1995 TAG: 9509130402
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 133 lines
Quickly, name a great team of people that has left a mark on American history. Can't do it?
OK, name an entrepreneur who through gumption and guts became an American legend. Easy, right? Andrew Carnegie. Henry Ford. Jean Paul Getty. Bill Gates. Michael Eisner.
As total quality management spreads through corporate America, employees are being asked to work in teams. Don't be a maverick. Cooperate, workers are told, because the sum of the team will be greater than its individual parts.
Taken on face value, TQM's push toward collaboration appears to conflict with the American ideal of individual effort. This country's concept of teamwork had been confined almost exclusively to sports, where we marvel that a team with ``good chemistry'' can beat one with several stars trying to grab their share of the glory. New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner is apparently among the last to learn this lesson.
But even on many championship sports teams, it's an individual who stands out - the star. The Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers were great basketball teams in the 1980s, but everybody knows Larry Bird made the Celtics and Magic Johnson led the Lakers. The Chicago Bulls' three championships in the early '90s? Don't make it easy.
Teams, or ``self-directed'' teams, ``groups,'' ``clusters,'' or whatever a company's preferred term, are a pillar on which the total quality management movement in the work force is based. And it's easy to see why. If two brains are better than one, group-think must be far superior to a single mind.
TQM holds that a group of people with common work tasks can be given the goal of solving a problem, work on it without hands-on managing, and come back with a proposal to streamline their jobs. They know more about their jobs than top management, so why not let them tackle the inefficiencies?
Union Camp Corp. in Franklin has one of Hampton Roads' more advanced team structures. The setup emphasizes sharing information to help workers understand their jobs better - rather than allowing one person to hoard information to feel important.
``Traditionally, people have had job security through keeping information and protecting it so people have to come to them to find out something,'' says Steve Strickler, a systems analyst at Union Camp.
The success of computer software like Lotus Notes, which allows several people to work on the same document at once, shows that the work force is moving more toward information sharing, Strickler says.
Teams generally fall into three categories: parallel teams draw workers from several departments and study something in addition to their regular work; project teams pull workers for temporary work on a problem; members of process teams do all their work within the group.
In their youth, though, teams have shown some wrinkles that need ironing out if workers are expected to buck this country's tradition of individual accomplishment and top-down management.
First off, how does an employee exceed his company's expectations and gain recognition if he is truly a selfless team member? Second, what does a company do with a brilliant, but perhaps nonconformist, worker?
Companies haven't really laid out their plans on either front.
Gerald Endress, a process engineer with Hercules Inc., says he feels good about accomplishments in Hercules' team-based system. But his future in the system is unclear.
``It depends on how my company is going to promote me to the next level, and that's the part I'm unsure about,'' says Endress, who is in his late 20s. ``Are they going to base it on,`Well, he's done a real good job with these teams and therefore he should go to the next level?' ''
That's one of the TQM movement's stickier and more pressing questions. Companies can't afford to institute every aspect of TQM at once. To do so would require them to explode traditional work systems and rebuild from scratch. That would put some out of business, at least temporarily.
The compromise is often a hybrid of the old and new. That clash of top-down management and bottom-up team decision-making can lead to mixed signals, contradiction and frustration.
Sometimes, new systems are put in place before the company makes clear its expectations and rewards. Teamwork often falls into that category. Workers say they're not always clear on what work teams are suppose to accomplish and their pay hasn't increased with their work load and responsibility.
The Hay Group, a human resources consulting firm in Philadelphia, surveyed 577 large companies this spring and found only 12 percent based part of workers' pay on team accomplishments. An additional 39 percent were considering it.
Some companies with team structures don't even base part of their pay system on teamwork. Steve Gross, who leads the Hay Group's compensation practice, says companies can get away with that for only a short, honeymoon period.
``Initially, there's a euphoria around teams,'' Gross says. ``The ability to do new and interesting things and exposure to management is enough to energize a team, but you can't sustain it.''
In other words, Gross says, management can't tell an employee to do the teamwork then pay him the same as ``somebody who just does a job.''
For now, many companies say job security is the reward for successful team-based management. Being more efficient, producing better quality, doing more with less keeps people employed.
That's a harsh but sobering note in this decade of corporate Darwinism.
If the pay isn't going to be better, what about advancement?
Organizations are supposed to be ``flatter'' under team-based management. In theory, that means fewer midlevel managers. That means less opportunity for ``upward mobility.'' Without hope for advancement, workers will be forced to switch employers if they want to move up.
Companies will have to find a way, other than through promotions, to instill loyalty in workers like Hercules Inc.'s Endress, who wonders if there's room for advancement in this new system.
``The positions above you are being forced down, so there's not as much room to move up. You know you're limited in how far you can move,'' Endress says.
``Almost everyone I know of my age is looking for other jobs.''
The philosophical side of teamwork may be even tougher to take. Some people lacking in interpersonal skills may find it difficult to work within a group. Team members may be inclined to shove aside or even encourage the firing of a coworker who doesn't fit in or robustly participate.
``If that one individual is not on board with the program, you need to confront the issue and find out why. Maybe you need more education,'' says Greg Ratliffe, project manager at Doughtie's Foods in Portsmouth. ``But if you can't overcome that then there's no place for that person as far as I'm concerned.''
At its worst, this system could create within a company a culture of uniform thought. TQM is supposed to foster different thinking from previously untapped workers.
At its best, teamwork can unleash a wave of fresh ideas and solutions. It can even make history. The scientists recruited for the Manhattan Project worked as a team to build the world's first atomic bomb.
Of course, even though more than 2,000 people worked on that project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and even though the lead team contained 12 people, that's not the way history remembers it.
Who built the bomb? Most people remember only one man, the team leader: J. Robert Oppenheimer. ILLUSTRATION: [Dilbert cartoon]
KEYWORDS: CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT by CNB