Roles in a team: a self-management perspective
A practical approach to dealing with tasks & relationships in a team (PART 2)
In my last story I wrote about task functions and a process to implement them.
This piece is about team roles that help a team (a) to do its task and (b) maintain itself as a group.
Maintenance functions of a team are activities that help build the group’s sense of identity and develop the social relationships in the group, i.e. building relationships. They comprise of :
· Encouraging
· Compromising
· Peace-keeping
· Facilitating (clarifying, summarizing)
· Standard setting
· Collaborating
There will be members, who need encouraging, conflict that needs managing, information that needs distributing and clarifying, standards that need setting and other teams that need collaborating.
Effective teams we are told will need to fulfill task functions and maintenance functions. I would add, how these functions are carried out (my last piece) and who does them will also impact a team’s effectiveness.
A manager’s many roles
I am using the term manager and leader interchangeably in this piece. A Google search of a ‘manager’s roles’ will lead you to Mintzberg’s 10 managerial roles which he coined way back in the 1970s. These roles are put into 3 categories of Inter-personal roles, Informational roles and Decisional roles.
Inter-personal roles — Roles involving providing information and ideas, i.e. Figurehead, Leader, Liaison
Informational roles — Roles involving processing information, i.e. Monitor, Disseminator, Spokesperson
Decisional roles — Roles involving using information, i.e. Entrepreneur, Disturbance Handler, Resource Allocator, Negotiator
I like Charles Handy’s more colloquial interpretation of these 3 categories of management roles as leading, administrating and fixing, which he mentions in his book Understanding Organizations. Professional organizations he claims separate the leading from the administrating and fixing.
These are a lot of roles for one individual manager or leader to take on and it’s difficult to imagine one individual having all the skills needed to perform these roles well.
In organizations that want to implement shared responsibility, participatory governance or self-management practices, there is some value is looking at what firms like Buurtzorg are doing or the practices of governance models like Sociocracy with respect to designing team process roles.
A simple and practical tool to build a shared responsibility team is to craft roles in the team that support the team process.
Roles in a self-managed team
Buurtzorg is a Dutch health-care organization where everybody works in a network of small, self-managing teams. Their self-managing teams of nurses operate autonomously, deciding within their team what needs to be done and by whom. This includes any task beyond their core nursing roles.
In Buurtzorg’s model of team design, they have seven different roles in each team. There’s the main or core role of nursing. The six other roles in the team address the following needs:
1. Managing facilities and reporting on budgets and expenses of the team
2. Monitoring and reporting on the team’s productivity
3. Developing collaborations across teams and distributing knowledge they gain within the team
4. Planning the time commitments of the team and updating the team of their plans or changes
5. Caring for team dynamics, encouraging relationships within the team in the context of the team and organizational goals
6. On-boarding and coaching new team members
As you can see these roles address the different tasks that a multi-disciplinary, self-reliant team needs. As stated in the Corporate Rebels piece these roles are rotated among team members. Rotating roles or even delegating them among team members leads to skill building. In a flat organization where there is no room for vertical job growth, job rotation and building different skills is a useful mechanism to provide job enrichment.
Team process roles in Sociocracy
Another example of how to design team roles comes from Sociocracy. Sociocracy or Dynamic Governance (as it is called in the U.S.) model has five roles that they call ‘process’ roles. The term ‘operational’ role is used for the core/main role of the individual.
The Leader
The leader looks to the future, keeping the team focused on moving ahead. He/she serves as a cheerleader and accountability partner while paying attention to the individuals in the team. The leader also serves as top-down link between the team and the levels above in the hierarchy.
The Delegate
The delegate supports the leader in representing the voice of the team members to others up, down and across the organization.
The Facilitator
The facilitator facilitates team meetings and ensures meetings are effective. The facilitator ensures tasks functions are systematically addressed and members have equivalence in meetings and interactions.
The Secretary or administrator
The administrator is the keeper of all the records of the team and interprets policies, minutes and other documents in case of disagreement or confusion. They take notes during meetings, keep time and organize facilities for meetings.
The Logbook keeper
The logbook keeper manages and maintains the minutes and records of the whole organization — a logbook. They ensure the logbook is up to date and provides members access to the logbook.
Some tips to dealing with team process roles
1. Roles can be held for a term and then rotated
2. Roles can be held by different individuals or combined and performed by one person as long as there is no conflict of interest
3. You can elect individuals into these roles based on who is best qualified, or who would benefit from a learning opportunity
4. You can implement this feature by initially setting up the role of the leader, facilitator and administrator and then add more roles as needed
5. A word of caution — the secretary’s role has a gender bias, in that it is invariably awarded to a woman. Something to consider in the larger discussion about diversity and gender.
6. You can review the work of your team and embellish this list of roles or add more roles.
Team process roles give the leader some choice in dealing with strain of too many demands on them. Task and maintenance functions of a team don’t need to be only the leader’s responsibility. A simple and practical tool to build a shared responsibility team is to craft roles in the team that support the team process. This is a practice worth trying.
