Self-organising teams don’t just “happen”

The concept of the self-organising team has been knocking about for a while now in agile project management circles. It’s starting to seep into the lexicon of leadership and management more widely but there’s a lot of confusion about what they are, why we’d want them and how they need to be supported.

Why are self-organising teams so good?

If you’ve been on a high-performing team before you’ll know this but here’s some definitive advantages that self-organising teams have over the traditional “command and control” model.

• they make better and quicker decisions without requiring endless checking or reporting
• power and authority is transferred to people who are closer to the customer and can adapt to their needs more quickly
• they make the best use of people’s available time and resources — team members don’t have to wait for the next meeting to start their next task or help each other out
• they make best use of people’s breadth of skills and knowledge rather than just their own specialist area
• they are simply more rewarding to be a part of — giving team members autonomy, mastery and purpose. You will engage and retain more of your top talent this way.

What does self-organising actually mean?

One way of looking at how teams operate is to think about which type of responsibility the team members are given vs. how much is retained by management.

To some extent, a team can organise itself in any of these contexts but it’s much more likely to happen in teams that are not manager led. Typically, it’s self-managing and self-designing teams that we see most commonly on projects and business transformations.

Self-organising teams are characterised by:

• distributed control, — there might be a coordinator or coach role but no one person is “in charge”
• continuous adaptation– the team have the freedom to flex and adapt to changing circumstances
• emergent structure– how the team operate together emerges from the interactions between team members, not dictated from above
• feedback — the team give each other authentic and constructive positive and negative feedback
• resilience– to both internal and external challenges due to the team’s ability to repair and adjust

How do they need to be supported?

One common misconception is that self-organising teams will “just happen”. Give a group of people a shared goal and tell them to get on with it, right? It very rarely happens like that, particularly in organisations where people are not used to this way of working.

Here’s 5 things that will help:

Constraints — if you’re trying to align your self-organising team within a bigger organisation you need to make sure that it’s clear how they fit into the bigger picture. As a minimum teams need to know a) what their clear and specific objective is b) what is in and out of scope c) how much time they have and d) how much money or resource they can use. Knowing exactly what to define and what to leave up to the team is a fine art. Time-boxing teams is generally a good idea.

The right mix of people — this should go without saying but as well as the right mix of skills and experience you also need the right mix of personalities and attitudes. First and foremost, team members should care about what they are working on and should actively want to be on the team.

Visual management — it’s very difficult to self-organise without being able to see a clear picture of what’s going on. Using a task board, Kanban or just a clear and transparent action plan will help the team to make decisions about what they need to be working on and when

Trust — The organsisation must trust the team to operate within their constraints and to use their good judgement on decisions and actions. Team members need to trust each other enough to hold each other accountable for their behaviors, actions and results. This trust will build over time but the commitment to building trust needs to be there from the start.

Coaching — Self-organising teams don’t need command and control style management but they still need supporting. The traditional project manager or project lead type role becomes more like a coach — helping to facilitate, challenge and stretch the group to reach their collective goals. Another important coaching role is to ensure that the team is regularly reviewing their progress and how they are working together for continuous improvement.

Patience — Self-organising nirvana doesn’t happen overnight. With a new team it can take a little while for them to get into their groove but when they do it will be worth it. This is particularly true if they are only spending a fraction of their day job on the team. Try to ring-fence as much dedicated time as possible to speed up the process of forming-storming-norming and performing.