The Importance of Teams
The word ‘team’ is most commonly defined as, ‘a group of players forming one side in a competitive activity.’
For many of us growing up, becoming a part of a team whether informal or formal was a ‘rite of passage’ to becoming accepted by our peers. We practiced together, played together, won or lost together. Joining a team, and participating with one, gave us a crucial separate identity from our family unit, and made us feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. Through thick and thin we bonded with our teammates.
Yet, as close as we may have been, a team is not a family. In a family, you should be loved and appreciated regardless of your contribution. In a team, results matter.
Another characteristic of a team is that they are led by a coach. In the context of an athletic team, the coach is the person who provides instruction, training and leadership for their team. Most of us can think back and recall coaches who had profound impact upon us.
Lessons we learned participating on teams such as the spirit of collaboration, giving our best effort, putting the success of the team above our own interests, and supporting our teammates; and those we learned from being coached such as being open to learning and accepting critique, experimenting and trying out new techniques we’ve been shown, to being humble and acknowledging when we were wrong… carry forward throughout our lives.
Teams in the Workplace
The concept of teams in the workplace goes back roughly a century to the famed ‘Hawthorne Experiments’ designed to determine the impact of lighting and other changes on worker’s productivity. Interestingly, the experiments yielded knowledge of how workers benefited from organizing into teams with a shared sense of purpose, mutual support, and cohesiveness among other learnings.
The term ‘team’ in the workplace can be defined as a ‘group of people with a full set of complementary skills required to complete a task, job, or project.
Team members (1) operate with a high degree of interdependence, (2) share authority and responsibility for self-management, (3) are accountable for the collective performance, and (4) work toward a common goal and shared rewards(s).’
So…. did Toyota discover the concept of the workplace team? Absolutely not. Have they ‘weaponized’ it to a level that gives them a competitive advantage in industry? I think that it’s fair to say that the answer is yes.
Exposure to Workplace Teams at NUMMI
My personal Lean journey began with the reading of, ‘The Machine That Changed the World,’ by James Womack and Daniel Jones back in 1984. At the time, I had been an executive at General Motors Corporation for about fifteen years working in several component manufacturing plants.
What I read irritated and confused me, because I was sure that the ‘GM way’ was the best in the world. Fortunately, I was not stupid enough to ignore it, and I decided to ‘go and see’ for myself.
I arranged to visit the NUMMI (the Joint Venture formed by GM and Toyota at the closed GM-Fremont (California) Vehicle Assembly Plant where the two companies were building vehicles using ‘The Toyota Production System’.
I saw a UAW workforce that had been credited with building the ‘worst’ quality in any GM plant, now building a set of vehicles that were rated as the best Quality in GM by JD Edwards.
I saw a non-confrontational environment in which the UAW Hourly Team Leaders not supervisors were training, guiding and directing the day-to-day activities of the workforce.
I saw an extremely clean well-organized manufacturing plant where material was not clogging aisles, but was being delivered to ‘point of use’ on a timed delivery basis, replenishing only what had been used in the past hour.
And…I saw an entire manufacturing operation balanced to a 56 second ‘takt time’ with ergonomically correct job tasks.
In short, I saw the value and the impact of the Toyota Production System first hand. At the time, I did not fully grasp what TPS was and how it accomplished so much in this plant, but I knew I wanted and needed to learn more.
Experiencing TPS Teamwork First-Hand
I returned to NUMMI after moving into a GM Plant Manager assignment. I spent two weeks with the support of the GM NUMMI learning center working as an hourly employee in every job task in their material handling organization. I was trained and directed by their UAW Team Leaders in Standard Work, how it is created and improved.
At NUMMI, each Team Leader was a coach who was involved in the direction, instruction and training of the operations of a team and/or of individual people.
I learned how Team Leaders are selected, how they were trained/ certified to do their jobs and watched how they resolved material flow interruptions without having to call a Group Leader (Supervisor) for direction. And, I learned that living ‘in’ a system and working within it is a vastly different experience than reading about it in books, or being taught it by someone else. I had seen the power of workplace teams, and of Team Leaders in a coaching role, and was a convert to TPS.
Despite everything I had learned, there were many aspects of what I had experienced at NUMMI that I could not apply ‘back home’ due to the relationship with the union. In particular, the workplace team/ Team Leader structure could not be implemented. Still, I applied what I could, and waited until I retired from GM to deploy TPS more fully. Creating a workplace team structure with Team Leaders became a foundation element of my approach for workforce engagement in ‘Turn-around’ Plant Manager assignments.
©2020 Guest Blogger - D. Moore for ValueFlo Consulting LLC
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