Just say yes - surviving corporate reorganizations and self-directed work teams

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1996 by Ernest Stableford

So you say the scalpel light in the boss' eye cuts strangely into the middle distance ever since his return from that three-day "Tools for Transformation" retreat at the local Holiday Inn?

This is the guy who used to run the personnel office but, under reorganization, scarfed up the suite next to the CEO's and now appears to have a finger in everything?

His familiar, complacent smile is no longer fixed on you as he passes by but, rather, on the inevitable. At weekly meetings he speaks reverently of change (brief fading reverb), and from now on you're on a first-name basis-that's Richard, not Dick.

PROGNOSIS: the new boss has found religion. It's called Self-Directed Work Teams. And he is your boss no more-but hold on to those gleeful eruptions of relief. Now he's your ...Path Leader.

That's his position in the empowerment flow chart on page 10 of the company's new Vision Statement. The first nine pages are a windy intro to the bold new adventure your once-secure position is about to become. You are now part of a team forging new cooperative pathways into the new economy with a new appetite for innovation and increased productivity that is matched only by a new-found sense of compassion and a new desire to be of service. This irreversible trend is already transforming good old SS&S (Smoke, Sewage & Sawdust, Inc.) from a resource-crunching, product-belching, fiscally marginal leviathan into a sleek, new, customer-driven service provider to the global economy.

So why that weak feeling in your bowels?

Even though the distant tone of voice hasn't much changed, or that prep-school leer he uses when he's telling you and the rest of the staff that you're all team members now, you understand that the boss--that is, the Path Leader (PL)--is using words like opportunity and empowered decision-making and broadening your base of skills to break bad news. Number one: the organization is now "an open-skills, multitasked environment." In other words, the job description you developed last year to the tune of 40 or 50 hours of company time (when everyone was "fired" and required to reapply to their own positions--you remember that) is scrap paper now and wholly open to the PL's whims and discretion. Only he calls this "servicing the needs of your client base."

Number two: cooperation, not competition, will spur your team to higher productivity. In other words, that position in the pecking order just above yours--the one you were bucking to be next in line for--has gone the way of your cubicle walls. Where a ladder of incentives once connected the lowly rung of your present position to the airy upper level of your boss', there now exists an unbridgeable void. Richard confesses he knows little about what you actually do. It's his "mission" to get you focused on the needs of your clients. So you may walk in his newly open door any time it's not closed. But you can no longer get there from here.

"Continuing quality improvement," "skills-based assessment," "enhanced support mechanism," "team-implementation strategies," "horizontal promotion"--you've heard Dick talk for years, and the gaseous feeling in the pit of your stomach is still your best interpreter of Richard's new healing rhetoric. The path leader's position is now unassailable from below. And you rightly suspect that your one and only hope in surviving what, with the secret thrill of those who visit the mountain top, the PL calls change (brief fading reverb) is to feign basking in the light the PL has returned with.

The fact that "addressing compensation and rewards for increased productivity" is a stage-five implementation of Self-Directed Work Teams--and one to three years down-line--should clue you in: it's business as usual. Only the words have changed (brief fading reverb). So your first priority is still to secure your own position. Even the new Vision Statement recommends you conduct your job as if you were in business for yourself. Not a safe assumption, given the rate of return on your taxes, health insurance, and savings, but still a useful workplace metaphor with which nobody who's held the same job for more than a year would argue.

And therein, too, lies the solution to your real problem: namely, how to survive this latest squall of bureau-babble and accrue pay raises that stay within sprinting distance of the rate of inflation. Or, on the more immediate level, how to get the PL off your back so you can get some work done.

Though your boss--that is, your PL--has lost sight of it, because the adage is not indexed in the Vision Statement, beauty still rests in simplicity. So his nouveau palaver is vulnerable to one magic word--the word, in fact, that your PL, being the nervous, abstract organization junkie you've got to be to have his kind of job, will never get enough of. It's the world's second oldest: yes.

That's the key to Self-Directed Work Teams: "Just say yes."

There are infinite variations, of course. But to someone addicted to deadlines, budget shortfalls, internecine skirmishes, rageaholic CEOs, and a resume permanently afloat and up for grabs in the obsolescent market for managers, the particular nuance of yes is inconsequential. It's like an olive to the alky ordering a first martini who, though he protests it is the secret of the perfect drink, cares only that what's in the glass is at least 80 proof, is real light on vermouth, and will never run out. In your yes dwells the same mystical power as that olive: it keeps the drinker from up-ending the bottle by the neck.