Managing Collaborative Teams

This is about managing teams of the future because the future is upon us. Managers are challenged with managing team members need to develop new ways of learning that allow them to absorb and retain higher volumes of information in just one day that may been previously absorbed within a week. It is also not just learning information. They have to learn new ways of making distinctions and underlying principles. The level of creativity that is emerging and that will be required for entry into this new age is extreme.

Not only have we transcended the need for manual laborers in which efficiency, enforcement, and exploitation of people was the key to major success, we have nearly transcended the age of knowledge workers in which information management has been the new secret.  There is now a need for creative artists who are based in science and mathematics who will create the innovations of the future. Innovations that will meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world – economically, socially, financially, and environmentally.

In order to get out ahead of this curve it is becoming more and more essential for managers to give up the “herdsman model” of the industrial revolution and give up the “knowledge model” of the information age. Managers now must become serious mentors and highly effective coaches that work with people who may be far more brilliant than them, to bring out their creative brilliance of their team members and put it to work effectively. Companies that have been absorbed with improving the “production process” and the IT “technical processes” must now fully engage the emerging imperative of improving the “human process.”

A senior manufacturing executive was once quoted as saying: “After the fortune we have spent in business process improvement, everything around here works perfectly except the people.” This may at first glance look like a cynical statement, but it is one that should be taken seriously. The real leverage on every organization is on the human side of the process equation and the biggest boost to organizational performance is front-line innovation. The return on the significant investment into business process improvement modalities is marginal relative to an equal or even greater investment into the human side.

To keep up with the accelerated evolution in technology, basic human skills such as thinking, listening, speaking, and managing need a serious upgrade. Managers as well need to shift their focus away from managing accountability to managing creativity.

This is because no matter what an organization produces, there is no such thing as an organization without people. The very word “organization” means people working together.What people bring is something that machines and even other species can never bring. People can not just create something out of something like other species that can procreate. People can compute but they bring something beyond computation that machines will never bring. People can create something form nothing. Even more remarkable is the people together can crate from nothing something that none of them could have fathomed on their own. This is what makes us all unique and quite irreplaceable.

Therefore, no matter how much a business process has been improved, when people are still working against each other, not because they want to but because they do not know what else to do, this necessary evolution in human process improvement gets put on hold. When people are presented with an alternative to the competitive model, they gladly embrace it because it is more natural. This means that what people have been doing with and to each other has been unnatural. The surprise is that as daunting as this challenge of significantly upgrading basic human skills may seem, it is very easy to change.

Developing stronger people builds stronger teams. Stronger teams build better organizations and better organizations can build a better world.