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Self-Managed Teams are fully autonomous teams with little-to-no top-down supervision. They take full responsibility for their results, and they can be temporary or part of the overarching organization.
Tech companies like Google, Facebook, Spotify, and others use them to increase productivity and output at scale, with low overhead, while reducing pressure on managers who may already be stretched thin.
Examples of Self-Managed teams include:
According to most sources, about 80% of Fortune 500 companies are using self-managed teams in some form (although we had a hard time tracking down the original source for this stat). These teams perform well because they:
Autonomy is the driving force behind any self-managed team. What an organization must do is define the objectives, parameters, and vision, then get out of the way.
This isn’t easy. There’s a lot of trust involved in allowing a self-managed team to operate.
We’ll dive into the characteristics team members should have in the talent section, but it’s important that each team member is highly aware of the larger company goals, and the vision behind those goals.
Most of the businesses we talk to say that they want to give direction to their team members, and walk away knowing fully that the team knows how to execute, and why.
How To Align Self-Managed Team With The Company Vision
Here is a collection of the most effective vision strategies to use when aligning a self-managed team:
Make the Mission the Boss – Self-managed teams share managerial tasks across members, with little or no direct supervision from managers. Instead, they make the mission, purpose, and vision the bosses. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
The Jet Engine – “I’ve got a 3-year-old daughter, and I figure that every plane we build engines for has someone with a 3-year-old daughter riding on it.” That’s the purpose a GE electric plant employee in North Carolina tied to their work as part of a self-managed team—what’s the purpose tied to what your organization does?
The Road To Self-Management – “First, ask everyone on your team to write down a personal mission. Second, look for small ways to expand the scope of employee autonomy. Third, equip every team with its own P&L account. To exercise freedom wisely, employees must be able to calculate the impact of their decisions. The road to self-management is paved with information. Finally, you must look for ways to erase the distinctions between those who manage and those who are managed.”
Be A Coach – “I always ask these questions from my reports: Is the company vision clear? Are the company goals clear? Do you understand what we’re trying to accomplish and the near-term objectives?” says Mike Seavers, who outlined here how he helped grow the software company Riot Games from a few hundred employees to 3,000
Your Vivid Vision – A clear picture of what success looks like can do wonders for a team with a high degree of autonomy. As you’ll see in the talent section below, those that make up teams like these are driven, self-starts who are eager to execute. Give them a clear vision of why, and you can instill an incredible level of ownership and productivity.
Tony Hseih founded LinkExchange at 23, sold it to Microsoft for $265 million two years later, and became the CEO of Zappos in 2000 when their total sales were $1.6 million.
In 2015, he offered severance packages to all employees who felt the idea of self-management wasn’t a fit.
Most decided to stay, but 18% took the package.
Four years later Zappos reached $1B in revenue.
It’s easy to see why self-managed teams are being used by 80% of Fortune 500 companies because they:
The 1990s saw a huge leap in the use of self-managed teams and their ability to to provide a competitive advantage:
The organizations above achieved this by:
In short: empower your talent to push themselves.
Self-management isn’t for everyone. Some people work more effectively with more rigid structure, and find leadership’s direction and feedback makes them more productive. People who do well on self-managed teams usually:
Once the decision has been made to assemble a team to produce an outcome, the organization can align their talent by prioritizing those with the above characteristics (and any others that may be important). Then, they can use the following strategies as guidance:
The actual structure of a self-managed team can vary, as there’s usually no traditional hierarchy. Everyone understands how their role fits into the larger goal of the group. For example, a company may assemble self-managed teams for product design that would look like this:
Obviously the big selling point of a self-managed team is no managerial oversight, but that doesn’t always mean the team doesn’t have a lead. The difference, though, is that self-managed teams have a facilitator, who works within the guardrails set by leadership. They’re often referred to as a Servant Leader:
Source: https://asana.com/resources/servant-leadership
Self-directed Agile teams have the same idea, assigning a Scrum Master whose central role is to facilitate communication and backstage project management:
Other self-managed teams structures, like those used at Zappos and other large companies, the leadership responsibilities are distributed amongst different members of the team; authority belongs to the role, not to the individual.
Google is known for their commitment to cross-functional and self-managed teams, but they haven’t completely done away with management, and instead optimized the role of management to get more done (an engineering lead can facilitate several self-managed teams at one time, exponentially increasing the operational value of the manager).
The self-managed team’s structural approach will depend on the size of the company and the goal of the team. Here’s a list of effective strategies when it comes to strengthening the organizational structure, decision making process, and communication of a self-managed team.
Self-Managed Teams are fully autonomous teams with little-to-no top-down supervision. They take full responsibility for their results, and they can be temporary or part of the overarching organization.
Tech companies like Google, Facebook, Spotify, and others use them to increase productivity and output at scale, with low overhead, while reducing pressure on managers who may already be stretched thin.
Examples of Self-Managed teams include:
According to most sources, about 80% of Fortune 500 companies are using self-managed teams in some form (although we had a hard time tracking down the original source for this stat). These teams perform well because they:
Autonomy is the driving force behind any self-managed team. What an organization must do is define the objectives, parameters, and vision, then get out of the way.
This isn’t easy. There’s a lot of trust involved in allowing a self-managed team to operate.
We’ll dive into the characteristics team members should have in the talent section, but it’s important that each team member is highly aware of the larger company goals, and the vision behind those goals.
Most of the businesses we talk to say that they want to give direction to their team members, and walk away knowing fully that the team knows how to execute, and why.
How To Align Self-Managed Team With The Company Vision
Here is a collection of the most effective vision strategies to use when aligning a self-managed team:
Tony Hseih founded LinkExchange at 23, sold it to Microsoft for $265 million two years later, and became the CEO of Zappos in 2000 when their total sales were $1.6 million.
In 2015, he offered severance packages to all employees who felt the idea of self-management wasn’t a fit.
Most decided to stay, but 18% took the package.
Four years later Zappos reached $1B in revenue.
It’s easy to see why self-managed teams are being used by 80% of Fortune 500 companies because they:
The 1990s saw a huge leap in the use of self-managed teams and their ability to to provide a competitive advantage:
The organizations above achieved this by:
In short: empower your talent to push themselves.
Self-management isn’t for everyone. Some people work more effectively with more rigid structure, and find leadership’s direction and feedback makes them more productive. People who do well on self-managed teams usually:
Once the decision has been made to assemble a team to produce an outcome, the organization can align their talent by prioritizing those with the above characteristics (and any others that may be important). Then, they can use the following strategies as guidance:
The actual structure of a self-managed team can vary, as there’s usually no traditional hierarchy. Everyone understands how their role fits into the larger goal of the group. For example, a company may assemble self-managed teams for product design that would look like this:
Obviously the big selling point of a self-managed team is no managerial oversight, but that doesn’t always mean the team doesn’t have a lead. The difference, though, is that self-managed teams have a facilitator, who works within the guardrails set by leadership. They’re often referred to as a Servant Leader:
Self-directed Agile teams have the same idea, assigning a Scrum Master whose central role is to facilitate communication and backstage project management:
Other self-managed teams structures, like those used at Zappos and other large companies, the leadership responsibilities are distributed amongst different members of the team; authority belongs to the role, not to the individual.
Google is known for their commitment to cross-functional and self-managed teams, but they haven’t completely done away with management, and instead optimized the role of management to get more done (an engineering lead can facilitate several self-managed teams at one time, exponentially increasing the operational value of the manager).
The self-managed team’s structural approach will depend on the size of the company and the goal of the team. Here’s a list of effective strategies when it comes to strengthening the organizational structure, decision making process, and communication of a self-managed team
Copyright © 2023 Conscious Copy & Co. All Right Reserved. | Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy | Innovated by