Quality circles have not been totally successful in many organizations outside Japan. The reason is due to: we do not allow the teams to take on the responsibly and ownership. Manage does not want to let go! We want to keep responsibilities maybe we feel by letting go makes my job feel less needed and I’m out the door. Why does this happen? Lack of training for management! Again because we need to hear it LACK OF THE RIGHT TRAINING. Remember it’s okay for quality circles to make a mistake once in a while without a backlash from management. This is a learning curve that grows into success. A cross-functional team versus self managed teams is a large difference, if I were to take one or the other I would without a doubt go with self managed teams. It takes more in training but it develops a world-class environment. A cross-functional team can go from one area to another due to being crossed trained.Self managed teams takes on dept. budgets, cost avoidance, Time (sick, late, vacations, etc), quality, production and much more. When you have the team trained they too will be cross-functional.Hope this helps. RB from NC
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