[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4cast #479: Managing - or not - for productivity

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OPLIN 4cast #479: Managing - or not - for productivity
March 2nd, 2016

[image: teamwork] Team building has been a mainstay of organization
development exercises for years now. Most larger organizations, including
libraries, have at least tried combining staff into collaborations, on the
assumption that a team will be more productive than an individual employee.
Technology companies in particular make extensive use of collaborative
teams, because it's felt that teams are more innovative. Now there's a
growing awareness that while we think we know quite a bit about managing
and nurturing individual workers, we know very little about how they
function in teams or non-traditional work cultures. Here is a sampling of
recent thoughts about the nature of work.

   - What Google learned from its quest to build the perfect team
   <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html>
   (New York Times Magazine | Charles Duhigg)  "What interested the
   researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment
   usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one
   thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded
   that what distinguished the 'good' teams from the dysfunctional groups was
   how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could
   raise a group's collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could
   hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally
   bright."
   - 3 messages from the workplace of the future
   <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/great-work-cultures/three-messages-from-the-w_b_9223852.html>
   (Huffington Post | Great Work Cultures)  "The common belief that managers
   are responsible for 'their' employees' motivation is a perfect defense,
   because each side can blame the other when things go wrong. Employee
   engagement surveys typically describe most employees as disengaged, while
   blaming managers. What if organizations took the road less traveled, let
   everyone be fully accountable for managing him or herself, and then got out
   of the way? Goodbye, conspiracy of blame. When there are no bosses, there
   is no one else to blame. When there is only work and people that do work,
   people are transparently accountable for their own individual decisions and
   actions."
   - Zappos founder says his self-management experiment only cost him a
   tenth of his staff
   <http://readwrite.com/2016/01/19/zappos-holacracy-buyouts> (ReadWrite |
   Gregory Ferenstein) [Interview with Tony Hsieh]  "The default future for
   companies under the traditional structure is death. Something like 88% of
   the companies that were on the Fortune 500 list in 1955 are no longer on
   that list. The simple fact is that command-and-control structures do not
   stand the test of time, but self-organized and self-managed structures
   (such as cities) are resilient and do stand the test of time. In addition,
   research has shown that every time the size of a city doubles, innovation
   or productivity per resident increases by 15%. But with traditional
   companies, the opposite happens - innovation or productivity per employee
   generally goes down. Holacracy just happens to be the technology that we
   are using today, but our ultimate goal is that we want to structure Zappos
   more like a city and less like a top-down bureaucratic command and control
   organization."
   - Collaborative overload <https://hbr.org/2016/01/collaborative-overload>
   (Harvard Business Review | Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant)  "The
   exhibit 'In Demand, Yet Disengaged,' reflecting data on business unit line
   leaders across a sample of 20 organizations, illustrates the problem.
   People at the top center and right of the chart-that is, those seen as the
   best sources of information and in highest demand as collaborators in their
   companies-have the lowest engagement and career satisfaction scores, as
   represented by the size of their bubbles. Our research shows that this
   ultimately results in their either leaving their organizations (taking
   valuable knowledge and network resources with them) or staying and
   spreading their growing apathy to their colleagues."

*Articles from Ohio Web Library <http://ohioweblibrary.org>:*

   - Are bosses necessary?
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&AN=109325148>
   (*Atlantic*, Oct. 2015, p.28-32 | Jerry Useem)
   - First, let's get rid of all the bosses.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=109984490&site=ehost-live>
   (*New Republic*, Nov. 2015, p.26-39 | Roger D. Hodge)
   - The future is bossless.
   <http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.oplin.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=buh&AN=108326464&site=ehost-live>
   (*Business Week*, 7/13/2015, p.63 | Rebecca Greenfield)

------------------------------
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