Management 3.0

Self Organising Teams

A self-organizing system reorganizes itself based on the external stimulation that the environment provides. There could be several possible arrangements when they reorganize. The number of possibilities is limited by the constraints added to the system.  Some of the characteristics of a self-organizing team are:

• Team is conveyed what needs to be done. Team understands the vision for the work that needs to be done as a whole, not just the work associated with one member.
• Team is empowered to make decisions on how to best perform the task. However, the “Power comes with responsibility”. Team members understand the rules of the team and stick with it.
• Team quickly reacts to any unexpected events. This could be change in requirements or change in the team itself, like someone in the team leaving the company.
• Leader of the team adds or removes constraints to the team to stimulate it arrange in an optimal way.

Probably, a lot of people are wondering how to transform their team, which has been operating in a command-and-control mode, into a self-organizing team?

Groom the team:

A leader needs to take the team through the classic team building phases of “Forming-Norming-Storming-Performing”.  As the team is in forming phase, the leader needs to encourage the team members on team dynamics like:

• Communication: Communication between the members of a team is the most important aspect of self-organizing team. The leader of the team should encourage the practices that encourage communication. Some of the agile practices like planning poker for estimation, all planning activities, pair programming, daily stand up meetings help increase the communication among the team members.
• Credibility: Every member of the team needs to establish their credibility so that the rest of the team would have confidence in them. For example, if I know that my architect is credible with his designs, I won’t think twice to go ahead and implement them.

Understand and respect individual’s values:

Every member of the team would have some values. Team needs to identify those values and respect them. If my highest value is punctuality, I wouldn’t expect any one question if I am working 8 hours or not. One thing I did was that I asked every one on my team to identify their top two values. Then I published those to whole company.