Building highly engaged teams transformed an organization

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The "why" for my life's work started as a young boy while growing up in the midwest realized what happened at work with his parents (dad was an engineer & mom was a nurse) came home with them. If work was good things were good at home and vice versa. When asked what I wanted to study in college, I stated that I wanted to help create great places for people to work. As an undergraduate no guidance counselor could describe where I could study this. Finally I found it in BYU's Masters Program in Organizational Behavior where I had the privilege to study under and be a graduate assistant for the founder of that program, Bill Dyer. Bill by many is known as the "father" of team building. This is where I could begin to see how great places for people to work could be created, it was in teams. For over 40 years I have been studying, researching, learning, writing and consulting with organizations about how to create and sustain highly engaged teams and organizations. This article is a tribute to an organization and it's leaders who when the concept of engaged teams was in its early development and not widely embraced, believed that the talents and engagement of individuals could create a competitive advantage for them, if they could just figure out how to create and sustain what was referred to as high commitment / self directed work teams. Today I refer to them as teams of leaders. I am excited to share the story of what I had the privilege to experience first hand as I worked with wonderful leaders over a number of years to develop and implement a set of principles, frameworks and tools that truly made a difference for teams and their organization not only on the bottom line and with customers but also created a great place for people to work. Which I believe in turn benefited families, neighborhoods and communities.

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I spent half my career working in Human Resources, helping management deal with unions and difficult employees. It was exhausting work and made you wonder how much time was being wasted fighting with the employees and their representatives. I began working with Paul Gustavson in the early 1990's when my office was looking for a better way to do its work. We eventually transformed our organization into a team of leaders and received Vice President Al Gore's first "Hammer Award" for reinventing government. I later used this same approach/design in my next office and we eventually were given OPM's prestigious PILLAR (Performance Incentive Leadership Linked to Achieving Results (Award.) In my opinion, building teams of leaders is the way work will be done in the future. Instead of controlling employees, it unleashed employees resulting in them being engaged and committed and delivering great results. This article provides another concrete example of how converting to teams of leaders changed an organization and helped to achieve the types of things that others only dream of. It also discusses in depth the six key components needed to build teams of leaders: 1) the five stage team development model, 2) systems design, 3) process design, 4) a value creation model, 5) knowledge management, and 6) visual management. This article also shares one of the key principles behind our approach - i.e. organizations are perfectly designed to get the results that they get so if you want to change your results you need to change your design.

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