Making Workgroups Work
Making Work Better Through Teaming

Jack Stack, author of "The Great Game of Business," is famous for transforming the rusty old International Harvester into Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation by turning employees into fully involved team members. He had this to say about why teams are essential to organizational success: "You can sometimes fool the fans, but you can never fool the players."

Here are two strategies that players -- that is, team members -- can use to keep themselves energized, healthy and productive at work:

1) Swap duties from time to time. Almost everybody knows that a steep learning curve (just steep enough to be exciting, not overwhelming) keeps people jazzed. What better way is there to keep learning than to take on different tasks occasionally? For a decade now, industry has been proving that "universal operators" give work units the flexibility they need to respond to seasonal or unexpected demands. Workers who are trained to do different tasks, or whose job descriptions change in response to new challenges for their work unit, stay more engaged than their locked-in counterparts, provided that they're informed of impending changes and given the training they need to do the new jobs well. I've talked to sales people, systems analysts, teachers, office workers, consumer product developers, nurses and construction workers, to name just a few, who have all gotten re-invested in their work by swapping parts of their regular jobs with others. So, I know it works. If you're a little tired of doing your job the same old way, why not ask around in your work unit about what new tasks might interest people, and see what potential variations in how jobs are configured you might turn up? The best designers (and re-designers) of jobs are always the people doing the work. As CEO Robert Ferchat suggests, "Free people to innovate so that your company can grow. Creativity is not the divine right of management."

2) And while you're at it, why not consider teaming up on tasks assigned to individuals? On the surface, deploying several people in the place of one may seem inefficient, but people who divide up their jobs among themselves and other team members have more fun and are then freed up for other projects. It's a great way to practice better communication and collaboration as well as to experiment with "systems thinking," unraveling the twisted knots of a messy problem back to their sources. Different perspectives, shared in an atmosphere of mutual respect, will always get a better result than the Lone Ranger approach.

According to Fortune magazine, more than half of America's large Corporations are experimenting with self-managed teams. That's a productivity trend that you and your organization would do well to ride.