Indians Can't Have This Chief

Texas Slim writes his Notes from The Cube to Kyra 'n Hank 'n Pierre from the past three days . . .

'Sounds to me like y'all got a problem of responsibility without power: sorta what we've got around my Cubetown.

How's that work? Simple.

You take a person and give 'im a cross-functional team to lead. Almost by definition "cross-functional" means "people from other departments." Now what this sets up, ideally, is input from a lot of disciplines...

What it sets up, on the ground, is a team with a captain who has no authority.

Because, in reality, no manager of Sales or Quality or Facilities or Accounting or wherever there is a person drawn from - none of those managers is going to give up his or her authority over his or her reports to you, the team "captain" who is not under his or her thumb. That's not in human nature.

And it doesn't matter if you're a manager yourself: in some ways, that may even be worse - I'm going to give authority over my reports to your department? I think not.

So these teams aren't really teams: they're . . . a mob? A "consensus group"? An "advisory board"? Let's give it the most positive spin: a group of well-intentioned people who have not got the authority to make decisions on behalf of the expertise they represent but have been placed in the position of representing that interest group.