The Flat Hierarchy

Since I'm still getting this idea off the ground I want to stick with more personal theory/fundamental posts to help establish my point of view.

This week I'm writing about my ideas for the need of flat hierarchy in the workplace. My definition for a flat hierarchy is a workplace where there is minimal difference in the way management and staff are viewed. Each "side" maintained defined roles they fill on the team, but importance of those roles is brought to equality.

This is an idea that came to me naturally before I actually identified it. My core values for team involve not valuing any one part of the team over another. While it's true that some parts of a team might require more experience and knowledge, it's also true that the team cannot function with any piece missing. The key is understanding that management tasks are simply a set of tasks completed by the team member assigned to them. Certainly, some of those tasks are "power" tasks like decision making, hiring, and firing, but they are still tasks that are essential to the team and assigned to a team member.

I believe that the best teams understand this. They operate with the understanding that everyone has a defined role that integral to the success of the team and they hold team members accountable throughout the chain of command. When separated into management and staff, both sides need to accept this.

Management needs to stay personable. They need to be visible in showing their hard work to staff and connecting those efforts to the success of the team. Some of the most dysfunctional teams have a significant disconnect wherein staff members feel that management doesn't contribute enough to the daily activities of the team. Managers can dispel these feelings by better communicating their activities, challenges, and successes with staff. By viewing management activity as a part of the team's job and not an omniscient position, management can stay a part of the team.

The staff needs to avoid fear of management. To some degree that environment needs to be delivered by the manager, but staff can create it by showing management that they expect them to be a part of the team, not simply the boss.

I'll stick with this topic next week and discuss some activities that teams can partake in to implement flat hierarchies.

Mutual Agreement

I recently met with a friend who works in a customer service position for another industry. She was talking about a challenge that she was facing at work in which she felt like management was "feeding the team canned statements to use with customers." She said that offices in another part of the country had this idea, received higher customer service scores, and now it was being informally rolled out in her area. The problem was that her and her peers felt awkward and corny with many of the new lyrics and, as a result, the process wasn't being used in most cases.

Now, I purposely left out the specifics. They don't matter as most of us have seen this same scenario in our workplaces - one person/office/region tries something and gets results and suddenly it's the hottest thing to have a meeting about. Mostly, it makes sense. Good companies should spread the good news when a new method produces better results. Another thing that good companies should do is understand team mentality.

My friend used words like "feeding" and "canned". Those aren't very positive words to use when describing her perception of the implementation of the new lyrics. With no offense meant, I might guess they are indicative of her success with them as well. The problem isn't with the staff here though, it's with the delivery method.

A team will stand together against canned change almost without fail. It can be different when training a new employee, but experienced employees know their business. In this case, they know the customers coming into the office, they know the local culture, they "know" a lot of things about their office that they are pretty sure some colleague across the country cannot know. For this reason, a leader needs to be prepared to have a conversation that facilitates healthy conflict around the topic. The key is to understand that the person/office/region that made it work, made it work because of a shared vision and agreement to make changes to deliver a new consistent approach to the task.

If the challenge is achieving better results for customer service scores, then you start the conversation about customer service rather than success stories from a far off land. As a leader you share current results, suggest that you feel the team can do better, and share the story of the person/office/region as evidence that there are solutions to your challenges. Once the conversation starts, let it happen - let it blossom. If your team already feels comfortable speaking openly, you'll likely find that they agree that they can achieve better results.

Now you can turn the conversation back to the new method being used elsewhere. You will likely meet resistance, but don't set out to copy the lyrics of the other person/office/region, rather copy their mentality. To make a process their own, a team has to air out all of their feelings, they need to play "devil's advocate" and challenge the idea. Inevitably, someone will introduce reason back into the conversation, heads will nod, and progress will start to flow back in the direction of the original proposal. This conversation of healthy conflict is a crucial step to getting everyone to buy into the idea. When it gets skipped, challenges are unanswered and remain barriers to implementation for those individuals. By helping your team agree on a vision of what (in this case) better customer service scores should look like, you are on the road to getting participation from the team towards achieving that vision.

Opening Comments

I've started a few blogs in my time and I always feel the need to state my intentions with an initial post. Maybe it's just because I need to see it in type myself, but I'll share it with you anyway.

The reason that I chose to start this blog was to create a platform where I can share my experiences and thoughts surrounding team development and leadership. My hope is that I will open some conversation and we will all be able to tackle the many challenges that teams face together as a focused group. During the course of my career I have had the opportunity, as have all of you, to work on a number of teams. Some of these teams were great, others needed work, and they all affected the final results. Whether you're the leader or not, we all have a vested interest in keeping the team moving forward.

In leading teams, I have developed a set of activities that I try to keep in daily focus. They are:

• Development - I believe that we should always be learning, growing, and becoming experts in our field.
• Awesomeness - I believe in leveraging our strengths to be great at something. I'm talking about true strength here, not just "I'm good at selling XYZ Product," but "I'm good at communicating and use that to explain benefits of XYZ Product when I'm selling."
• Vision - I believe that part of the definition of team is unified vision. Everyone involved needs to know where they want to be as a unit by X date and what they're willing (and needing) to do to get there.
• Effort - I believe that we only control one real thing. Quarterly targets, daily challenges, frustrated customers and colleagues are all external realities that exist in every environment. When teams hone in on maximizing their effort they're meeting real potential.

These aren't exhaustive of the things that teams need to be aware of, but they are the most important to me and the ones that I fall back on when making decisions about daily activity. I'll touch back on these regularly as I cover different topics and experiences. Oh, and yes, I did chose "Awesomeness" over "Strengths" because it got me the "A" to complete my acronym - during a busy day, sometimes the only thing you can remember is your own name.

I am looking forward to creating a community here by publishing fresh content weekly. So if you like what you see please bookmark the blog, or simply follow me on Google + for regular updates.