How to Lead a Self-Organizing Team With Confidence

Self-organizing teams are the magical unicorn every company wants.

Imagine a team that manages itself, understands the big picture, focuses on customer value, and is capable of decreasing the delivery time for the end user.

That is exactly what a self-organizing team does…and so much more!

Part of the agile mindset is that the people closest to the work have the best information to make the necessary decisions. Self-organizing teams take a company’s strategic vision and break it down into manageable chunks. They are a fully functioning team that continues to improve the longer they work together. Leading a self-organizing team requires a subtle approach of never micromanaging and supporting the team through servant leadership.

But, more on that later.

In this article, we will discuss:

• What a self-organizing team is
• The responsibilities of a self-organizing team
• The role of leaders in a self-organizing team
• Agile management and mindset

Let’s get started!

What is a self-organizing team?

In traditional or waterfall team structures, a manager or supervisor will assign work to the team.

However, self-organizing teams function differently.

In a self-organizing team, the team does not wait for the manager to assign work. They assess needs internally instead of an external party determining them. A self-organizing team has the autonomy to determine how they will work together, what a reasonable amount of work is appropriate for a time frame, and more. 

By taking shared ownership of responsibilities, self-organizing teams are able to stay:

• Motivated
• Interested
• Engaged

The key is to ensure that all team members share an active role in the decision-making process.

What are the main responsibilities of a self-organizing team?

Self-organizing teams can backfire quickly if the right infrastructure isn’t established.

To keep keep chaos from descending, there are seven responsibilities or principles comprising the integrity of self-organizing teams, according to agile and scrum methodology experts:

1. Teamwork and collaboration
2. Competency
3. Consistent improvement and growth
4. Internal respect and trust
5. Ownership and commitment
6. Motivation
7. Continuity

Let’s explore those a bit more!

1. Teamwork and collaboration

Because teams decide what to work on when, it’s crucial teams have a strong sense of teamwork and collaboration.

They must function as a close unit for self-management to work.

Without it, the team will cease to be a team and just be individuals who work together.

2. Competency

There’s an old saying that a team is only as good as its weakest link.

This is very much true when it comes to self-organizing teams.

All team members must be competent at their jobs, have a solid skillset, and a disposition for collaboration. Ideally, team members will also be competent performing any job on the team. That truly is the essence of a cross-functional team, thus minimizing the impact if one team member is absent.

3. Continuous Improvement

The best employees seek out ways to improve. Members of a self-organizing team are no different.

Through every iteration, the team will refine their processes and styles to produce the best result.

With greater efficiency comes more productivity.

4. Internal respect and trust

There is nothing worse than working on a team with people you cannot trust.

Respect and trust are paramount to a self-organizing team’s success. They not only need to have the wherewithal to recognize other team members’ opinions but to take action on them.

At its core, respect and trust stems from the leader’s ability to foster an environment conducive to team members making decisions AND having leadership support them.

5. Ownership and commitment

When something goes wrong, the entire team takes responsibility, not just an individual.

So, it is critical that the team is committed toward their work. With commitment comes mistakes and sometimes, failure.

In agile, failure is:

• Okay
• Expected
• Allowed

Without failure, the team may never arrive on the best solution. What’s important is that the team supports others when failure occurs and that leadership condones it.

6. Motivation

Staying motivated as a team can be incredibly challenging.

Leaders should help teams understand how their work fits into the bigger picture and WHY their work is important.

Motivation is one of the biggest responsibilities for leaders of a self-organizing team.

Following through on tasks can create new problems (and sometimes mistakes and failure), but if the team has trust and commitment, as already established, then it can continue to thrive.

All team members must be motivated for it to work. It also helps if team members are interested and engaged, on top of motivated.

7. Continuity

Ideally, a self-organizing team is the long-term solution to inefficiency.

Long-lived teams are more successful because they:

• Understand how best to work with each other
• Have established processes and team norms
• Communicate strongly and clearly

Finding the right balance between team members and their personalities, opinions, and leadership styles can be an ongoing process, but it’s critical that leaders allow the team the opportunity to sort out differences before proposing a personnel change.

If teams continue to iterate and evaluate what’s working, they will be able to accomplish any high-level tasks.

Are leaders needed for self-organizing teams?

YES.

Leaders are unequivocally needed.

It just looks a bit different from the traditional structure, which can be a little scary at first.

A common gripe from managers undergoing the transition from traditional planning to agile planning is that they feel their purpose is redundant. Fighting for job security, they push against the change.

While it is a valid perception, it couldn’t be further from the truth.

Leaders need to:

• Support
• Motivate
• Create an environment where teams can thrive
• Produce the most value for the customer
• Champion the strategic vision

They are needed on an ongoing basis.

Middle management still has a purpose. They shouldn’t view themselves as a hurdle or a hindrance to setting up a self-organizing team. They are an integral part of it. The key is exerting influence and taking action in service of their team.

Members of a self-organizing team should all be leaders in their own rights, but that doesn’t disqualify them from having a leader above them.

If leaders reframe, restructure, and redefine the hierarchy with an agile mindset, they can empower their team members to take an active role in the decision-making process. This enhances the customer experience and can reduce the product delivery time.

In the process, they gain skilled, versatile team members.

The role of leaders on a self-organizing team

The leader of a self-organizing team has one primary function: support the team in whatever way they need.

The idea of a leader supporting the team is a principle known as servant leadership. “Servant leadership” was first coined in 1970 by Robert K. Greenleaf in an essay he published titled “The Servant as Leader.”

Servant leaders:

• Are servants first
• Ensure that other people’s highest priority needs are met
• Focus on the growth and well-being of their teams
• Share power

Traditional leadership, where one individual at the top of the pyramid accumulates and exercises power and makes all strategic decisions, is very different from servant leadership, where the strong desire is to serve first instead of lead first.

When you look at it that way, servant leaders are rather revolutionary. They’ve flipped the model upside down.

Self-organizing teams require a servant leader. It’s what they need to succeed. They need support. They need motivation to proceed in the right direction and keep going when obstacles occur.

All that is the leader’s job. And more.

How do you lead self-organizing teams?

Leading a self-organizing team can be tricky.

The best approach is providing the team with what they need to succeed:

• Fundamentals (the “why”)
• Specific values and capabilities (the “what”)
• Practical tools (the “how”)

Additionally, a clear and transparent communication structure is essential. If desired, a leader can set up times to meet with team members, especially in the beginning, to determine if the team has everything it needs.

Team members may need to be swapped out.

If the team isn’t succeeding, then leadership needs to talk to the team and locate the issue(s). 

Leaders can’t assume that individual personalities are the problem.

Problems can be:

• Environmental (team members feel they don’t have a safe space to experiment and fail while still having leadership’s support)
• Systemic (the company isn’t engineered to support self-organizing teams and requires a lot of approvals, unnecessary documentation, and/or other complications)

But, the leader should give the team adequate time and set up checkpoints to ensure that the team makes the most of their self-organization before modifications are made.

Ultimately, the leader should communicate strategic goals and be there to support the team more than anything else.

How Agile leadership and mindset are the key to self-organization

Self-organizing teams can be an incredible asset and power to any company. They can foster innovation, efficiency, and productivity with ease.

Understanding how to implement self-organizing teams comes with understanding two basic principles:

1. Agile Management
2. Agile Leadership

Let’s explore those in a bit more detail.

1. Agile Management

Agile management is an iterative approach to management that can deliver products faster with fewer headaches.

Agile planning:

• Is value-driven
• Has variable scope
• Has fixed resources (people) and time

An agile team works in small, consumable increments. That way, they can respond quickly to any changes that crop up.

One of the principle tenets of agile leadership is the encouragement of self-organizing teams and cross-functioning teams. With many of these teams functioning simultaneously, a company can expect an increase in productivity and efficiency.

Here are some defining characteristics of agile management:

• Adaptive planning
• Evolutionary development
• Early delivery
• Continual improvement
• Flexible responses

As you can see, there is a lot of crossover from self-organizing teams.

2. Agile Mindset

Having agile management or leadership isn’t enough, though.

To truly make the change, teams must adapt an agile mindset, which is characterized by a:

1. Way of being, thinking, and behaving that values empowering individuals to choose the way they work together for shared good
2. Collaborative, cross-functional approach for early, frequent, and iterative delivery of targeted business value

In an agile mindset, teams put aside ego and focus on what is right instead of who is right.

This is a stark but necessary departure from traditional, bureaucratic leadership which can involve office politics and adherence to the policy that whomever is the loudest is right.

Wrap Up

In this article, we discussed:

• What a self-organizing team is
• The responsibilities of a self-organizing team
• The role of leaders in a self-organizing team
• Agile management, leadership, and mindset

An important takeaway is that self-organizing teams will always be a work-in-progress.

While they are capable of producing fantastic results, self-organizing teams cannot be entirely left alone. They must receive support from a leader with a strategic vision to share who is willing to intervene when the team needs to adjust and is struggling to. 

If you are interested, we offer coaching to:

1. Train leaders to support their team members through the servant leadership and agile model
2. Train team members on self-organizing
3. Help you decrease the product delivery time
4. Strengthen your team’s communication and teamwork

Remember, the agile leader creates the environment for teams to thrive and act independently with confidence, and for individuals to exercise creativity and grow their maximum potential through self-organization and self-determination.

Every team can benefit from self-organization and an agile leader. Why not yours?