MT304 Unit 6 Team Lead Seminar Reflection Example

Nine Things the Software Did Not Touch: An MT304 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Whether Team Leads Are Still Needed

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

MT304: Leading the 21st Century Organization

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The seminar, insurer and grocery distributor are composite; Project Oxygen and the sources cited are real.

My Position

At our composite Denver auto insurer, about eighty percent of claim assignments are now made by a queue engine that matches each claim to an appraiser by skill, license and severity. A quality model scores every closed file on accuracy and documentation without any team lead's review. My argument was that whatever a team lead still does could be absorbed by spans of control twice as wide, saving perhaps four salaries.

The Challenges

A classmate summarized Google's Project Oxygen. According to Garvin (2013), Google's people analytics team set out to test whether managers made any difference among its engineers, half expecting to show they did not, and found instead that teams with better managers performed better and had lower turnover. I checked Garvin's account after the session rather than relying on the summary. It is strong evidence that managers matter at Google, but it may not transfer to claims work: engineers at a technology firm do different work, under different conditions.

A second classmate described a composite grocery distributor that removed its night-shift supervisors in 2023, relying on software to assign picking routes, and restored them eleven months later. Injury reports had risen, and investigators found that workers were skipping safety steps at three in the morning because no one with authority was present to stop them. That account supplied a mechanism: software can assign work, but it cannot stop a person from taking a dangerous shortcut.

The Instructor's Question

The instructor then asked me to list what our team lead had done the previous Tuesday that no software touched. I wrote it during the break. The list ran to nine items: talked a new appraiser through a total loss involving a deceased policyholder; overrode the queue to move a flood claim to someone who spoke Spanish; noticed an appraiser was quiet on a call and checked on her afterward; settled a dispute between two appraisers over a shared file; called a body shop owner who was threatening to stop accepting our estimates; approved a schedule change for a parent; explained a quality score to an appraiser who thought it unfair; covered a call during an outage; and recommended someone for the Unit 3 promotion posting.

The software handled the routine; every item on the list was something routine could not see coming.

What Changed

Most items on the list are judgment in exceptions: a grieving family, a language need, a struggling colleague, a conflict, an angry partner. Rost (1991) defined leadership as influence toward mutual purposes, and several items, the quiet appraiser and the unfair score, fit that definition: influence the appraiser could have declined. Others, such as the schedule approval, are authority. The software touched none of them. My original argument counted the work software automated and assumed the rest was small. I had never listed the rest.

What I Underestimated

Looking back, my original argument made a common mistake. I measured what the software did and treated everything else as leftover. The leftover was where most of the difficult work sat. Tuesday's list had no item that took more than half an hour, so none of it showed up as a large block of time, yet each item would have gone badly without someone with judgment and standing to handle it. The grieving family, the angry shop owner and the appraiser who felt her score was unfair would all have reached someone eventually, but later and angrier. The cost of removing team leads would not appear in any software report; it would appear in complaints, departures and the occasional claim that went badly wrong.

My Revised Position

Software has removed most of the routine assignment and checking a team lead used to do. It has not removed the exceptions, and exceptions are where a team lead's judgment and influence matter. Spans might be widened modestly, perhaps by a third, but doubling them would leave the nine items on Tuesday's list without anyone to handle them. Northouse (2021) describes leadership as a process rather than a position, and I now think the team lead role exists to hold that process in place when the exceptions arrive.

What I Will Do With It

In Unit 7, I will look at what decisions software should and should not make, and I will start from the list rather than from the automation rate. I also plan to ask our own team lead to keep a similar list for a week, to see whether Tuesday was typical.

References

Garvin, D. A. (2013). How Google sold its engineers on management. Harvard Business Review, 91(12), 74-82.

Northouse, P. G. (2021). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE.

Rost, J. C. (1991). Leadership for the twenty-first century. Praeger.