An experiment with self managed teams
Today we have a guest blog post from Vanessa Rombaut about an experiment they’re working on at PieSync, another small business that integrates with Highrise to sync contact data…
Back in November last year our CEO at PieSync, Ewout Meyns, had a bit of an internal revolution. He proposed we change from the traditional top-down management style to linear self-managed teams.
Since then we’ve been on a steep learning curve, and having a lot of fun working out our new roles.
What is a self-managed team?
Here’s a definition I found which sums it up. A self-managed team is a “self-organized, semi autonomous small group of employees whose members determine, plan, and manage their day-to-day activities and duties under reduced or no supervision.”
You see, what Ewout proposed makes perfect sense for a team like the one at PieSync. After PieSync raised €1.6 million in funding in early 2016, he and co-founder Mattias Putman had hired the best international talent to build their startup. They knew from the get-go there was a lot of creativity and drive in their employees.
What they didn’t know yet was how to unleash the talent they had on their hands. So they decided to experiment with the management structure.
Business Advisor Chuck Blakeman said this about self-managed teams:
“In the Participation Age, people don’t want jobs that just pay the bills, they want work that allows them to be fully human, make decisions and own their stuff. As more companies leave the Industrial Age management structures behind and invite people to decide, they are more likely to retain the great people they have. Giving people their brains back is becoming a necessity for keeping them. Self-managed teams is one great way to do that.”
I added the italics, because for me that’s the crux of self-managed teams, giving your employees their brains back.
In self-managed teams, members are given responsibilities, rather than tasks. So each team member feels invested in the success of the objective. These responsibilities create a sense of ownership in each member and the more invested they feel, the harder they work to see the project succeed.
Self-managed teams tips
If you’re interested in trying out self-managed teams for your company, I’ll tell you a few tips and how we’re structuring it at PieSync.
Understand team dynamics and create the team
How you go about the experiment depends on the size of your company. If your company is small, say 12 employees or less, you can create two teams of six or three teams of four. Larger companies with 100+ employees, would be better off beta testing one self-managed team of six people for every department in the company.
Self-managed teams aren’t going to work with every person or team, they tend to work best with a careful arrangement of complementary personalities and skill sets. Our jobs can never be done in a vacuum, we need teamwork and collaboration to reach our overall objectives.
In our self-managed team we know each other’s working styles and personalities really well, but if your team is a bit of a mystery to each other it’d be wise to spend time team building, diving into personality profiles, and holding communication workshops.
Share the responsibilities
We took company objectives and broke them down into responsibilities for each team member. The team member assigned to the responsibility is the one heading that particular project.
We then divvy up the resources, which for us is the marketing budget. In our team, resource allocation is flexible and depends on the overall scope of the company objectives for the quarter.
Keep an eye on progress
To keep an eye on the progress on the projects we’ve created a Trello Board.
The board is broken up into four lists. One is the “Teams” list which shows each member of the team and the domain they are responsible for. Under each card we list our broad responsibilities; for example I’m responsible for social media and blog content, if anyone needs something done with those things, come to me for help.
The second list is “Company Priorities broken down per team”. These Company Priorities are determined by the founders and the Board, usually with a lot of input from us. We then break these priorities into responsibilities per team.
The third list is the “Current projects”. Loosely defined, the projects are the tasks we’re individually undertaking to meet the Company priorities.
If you want to set up a similar Trello board, just take a look at our in-depth blog post here.
Notice we don’t get into micro depth about how the projects are done. We just expect the team member to do them, to recruit whomever they need to help them, and if they get stuck to shout for help.
To top it all off we have a bi-weekly brainstorm session with other teams, including development and business development, to ensure our marketing goals are in line with their goals.
We’re just starting on this project and we have high hopes for the future. In 2017 we’re going to be blogging about how our self-managed team Beta test is going. If you’re curious to see how this experiment turns out, be sure to subscribe out our blog.
Do you have any thoughts on self-managed teams? Let me know!
Vanessa Rombaut is the Digital Communications Marketer at PieSync. @PieSync helps you to sync your customer data bi-directionally between your favorite cloud apps and Highrise.
