Bossasaurus.

• Author: Manz, Charles C.
• Position: Bosses as a thing of the past - The Future

Are bosses becoming a thing of the past? Maybe, with self-managing work teams sweeping across the United States. Such major companies as Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Motorola, Ford, General Electric, AT&T, Xerox, American Express and Prudential have already begun to implement the teams.

The idea is to empower the workforce for high performance by assigning employee teams more authority and responsibility. Teams are now performing such traditional management functions as deciding who works on what job, solving quality problems, resolving interpersonal conflicts, training and evaluating one another and preparing preliminary budgets.

But not all work teams are alike. In fact, some team designs do relatively little to empower employees in meaningful ways. Sometimes teams are introduced in an otherwise very hierarchical organization with so many controls -- possibly under the guise of a total quality management program -- that they have no significant power and authority. While many organizations have learned to talk of empowered teams, fewer have learned to actually make them work.

The truly empowered and effective teams, the "SuperTeams," manage themselves so well that their combined contributions result in a synergy that allows them to far surpass the sum of their individual contributions. The key is to get beyond the traditional baggage of the boss-centered organization, so the SuperTeams can develop and flourish.

Perhaps the most important factor...