Concertive Control: Are You Ready to Immediately Increase Morale and Productivity?
Assembly line factory workers
Active supervision is resource and cost-intensive, but what if production can be optimized without dedicated monitoring?
Imagine it’s Friday afternoon. You’re supervising the production team.
You avert your attention for a second – hands drop, mouths move. You walk away to check on a supplier – wandering and aimlessness begin. It appears that your constant attention is needed for any work to get done.
It’s exhausting.
If only you could clone yourself. You work hard without getting so easily distracted, right?
Better yet, clone a whole team of you to do the work. Ah, the things you fantasize about when avoiding proactive solutions.
Finding the balance between telling the team something inspirational or constructively direct can be difficult. Doing so while considering that choice’s effect on the delicate surface layer of team morale? Even harder.
Welcome to the thankless adventures of supervision.
More often than not, your valiant (a person can dream, right?) attempts meet feigned, compliant ambivalence. The team returns to work, dismissing the interruption as a part of their day that they’re paid to tolerate.
As someone who faces these challenges, subscribes to the solutions, and sees good, and sometimes spectacularly bad outcomes, I feel your frustration. That’s why I’m here to help.
You may already have a prescriptive solution in mind.
Upskill your communication techniques? It sounds great on paper but will the noticeable delivery change resonate with the team?
How about extolling the virtues of team-building exercises? Team building has its place, but here, it’s a good way to entrench existing, substandard outcomes.
Outside of firing everyone and starting from scratch (tempted?), there isn’t an easy solution to be had here.
Unless there is.
Introducing your new superstar employee, Concertive Control.
What Is Concertive Control and How Does It Work?
In short, Concertive Control (CC) is a system in which self-managing teams encourage and enforce behaviors and standards based on normative rules.1 CC begins with a management decision that places unprecedented trust in their production teams.
While CC can look vastly different in different organizational settings, the following step-by-step process paints a general picture of the method:
Create a Vision — Management establishes organizational accepted minimum outcomes and scalable goals.
Establish Incentives — Management creates low-cost incentives to encourage team member engagement in the process.
Sell the Solution — Management presents the program to supervisors. Supervisors provide feedback on feasibility, deliverability & any personnel challenges.
Champion the Solution — Supervisors present the program to the production team. They highlight incentives and gauge the team’s perception of the achievability of outcomes.
Empower the Team — Supervisors facilitate a work session where team members devise processes that will meet or achieve established outcomes. Supervisor advises only by solicitation.
Practical Trial — The team performs a dry run through their process solution to gauge its effectiveness. This occurs under the observation of the supervisor.
Implementation — Once their solution is deemed effective, the team works unsupervised. The supervisor checks in at the end of the process or day to perform quality control and production verification.
Upskilling Strategy — Supervision is now only required for verification. Management structures training for upskilling supervisors.
Professional Development — Supervisors learn and demonstrate new operational management skills. Management delegates new responsibilities at their discretion.
Aspirational Engagement — Management focus shifts to executive goal achievement.
It’s important to note that CC rests the accountability to produce on the shoulders of the team rather than on supervisory staff. Workers collectively shape what their workday looks like. The pressure to perform sits with each worker initially. Over time, it shifts toward any workers who are not making their commensurate effort. Peer-based pressure ensues until performance improves.
That’s CC in a nutshell. Now let’s see what it can do to transform an organization.
How Does Concertive Control Benefit Organizations?
Once implemented correctly, CC becomes a powerful catalyst to improve many facets of your operation.
Under a well-conceived, carefully executed CC plan, production teams are able to take ownership of their work processes. They achieve true empowerment by putting their testable ideas into practice and realizing the incentive-laden results.
Empowered, engaged teams make for higher morale.
As production teams self-regulate to higher levels of performance, supervisory staff begin supervising results rather than behaviors or processes. This significant step towards macro-management affords them the opportunity to grow in their careers. The reactionary work of supervision is gradually replaced with management-level, proactive work.
Now free to focus on other organizational needs, supervisors are now trained in:
Creating continuous improvement framework processes
Engaging in change management
Process and production optimization
Professional upskilling
Soft skill cultivation
This experiential exposure also benefits supervisors in their traditional supervisory responsibilities. They begin to view their work and their team’s processes through a proactive lens.
The advantages of team empowerment brought on by strategic CC implementation actually trickle-up to management. Practical management is achieved through teams and supervisors. Now, management makes a marked shift from the practical to the aspirational.
The discretion on what goals to focus on now presents itself —
✔ Achieving annual executive goals?
✔ Meeting stakeholder demands?
✔ Fulfilling the vision statement?
✔ Opportunity nuggets for internal & external marketing?
When CC is integrated correctly, managers realize their full potential as leaders.
The vision needed to introduce CC is the same vision that will flourish in its results.
In What Job Types Can Concertive Control Be Effective?
The beauty of CC as business practice is that it’s quite versatile and highly scalable. That said, it still is most applicable to standardized production jobs. Organizations have tried implementing CC in more autonomous roles with mostly middling results.
A sound implementation of Concertive Control sees successful outcomes when:
Work is team-based, especially codependent teams.
Results are measurable and directly attributed to speed and accuracy
Volumes needed in production are consistent or at least predictable
Production standards aren’t contingent on continuous process, 24-hour coverage, etc.
Value-based (especially time bonus) incentives motivate the teams
Teams are on hourly compensation
There are ways to install aspects of CC to disciplines that have very little in common with those described above that still see layers of success. This speaks to the versatility of the concept. As more organizations engage in the methodology, we see new iterations that transcend the paradigm. More experimentation also brings more potential negatives to the forefront.
The Downsides to Concertive Control
CC will harm productivity and morale if hastily implemented. The same occurs when not accounting for contributing factors.
Like any process or transformational organizational change, CC must be approached with contemplative risk analysis. In other words – performed by trained professionals – DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
The major risk is to over-increase outcome thresholds. Doing so can discourage team engagement in the process. It can even lead to demoralizing team members.
Under-increasing or overly-delayed increases also produce deleterious effects on productivity. As teams acclimate to new higher standard expectations, “the new normal” sets in quickly. This makes a delayed increase a shock to the system that leads to resistance.
So, despite being a strong advocate for the method, my answer is a cautionary yes. The emphasis on deliberate careful implementation can’t be overstated.
Deliberate preparation breeds swifter results.
As Abraham Lincoln famously said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe”.
Final Thoughts on Concertive Control
These issues speak to the need for a deliberate approach to CC. However, with the exceptional results that well-implemented CC provides in relation to return on investment, it’s an endeavor worth pursuing.
Personally, I have experienced outstanding results from employing the methodology. I find that the most potent incentives are those that allow for shorter work hours for the same compensation, provided that the established thresholds are being met and quality is acceptable. My teams have thrived in this model, which brought a production increase of over 15% while affording the teams an average of two less hours of work per day.
As a result, I have upskilled supervisors to a level that allowed for a reduction in my management headcount and introduced a culture of innovation at the labor level.
All without adding payroll or overhead.
Concertive Control — Say hello to increased productivity and team morale — You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.
References
Barker, J. R. (1993). Tightening the Iron Cage: Concertive Control in Self-Managing Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(3), 408–437. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393374
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