Bliss

When you see a rock grow
When you hear smoke rise
When you feel a reflection
When you smell moonlight
When you savor partnership
When you grok another

Are self directed work teams blasé or still in vogue?

Let me frame the question...

I am a product manager in social marketing services. I am in a position to advise brands on approaches to social.

Organizationally there is an edge between marketing and customer service that presents itself in a barrier between the nature of communications between these two groups and the brand's customers.

When customers engage socially about a product, they expect to hear one voice from the brand.

The solution to me appears to be a cross functional team that can engage with customers socially without any internal barriers.

Would it be blasé to suggest this team should be self directed? I think the leadership of a designated individual would unnaturally shape communications in favor of one of the elements of the team. However, with a self directed team, communications would have a chance to be shaped by the most relevant element to the situation.

Is there another style of teamwork that seems appropriate to this scenario? Has the concept of self directed teams been repudiated?

I am also posting this on LinkedIn. I will give you credit, but let me know if you don't want your response cross posted.

Leadership by Objective?

John Beiter asks for advice on LinkedIn: I have a client that is struggling to create specific objectives to measure leadership.

My advice:

If you mean objectives as in "Bill must do X by Y date" and then the measurement is success or failure, I would not approach it this way. To me this sounds like management by objectives and I would not apply management measures to leadership. I would have the client think in terms of which qualities they expect in a leader. Have them come up with 4. Then have them come up with 4 behaviors that express each quality. You can measure behaviors. Have the client assign a scale and they are off to the races. Keep in mind that at different levels of the organization, more and different leadership qualities are expected. As the second iteration, have higher levels of management scored on additional qualities. You can see how I add qualities to the puzzle starting with first & second line supervisors here.