Empowering teams while staying hands-on

In the era of Management 3.0, many managers are unsure how to approach the new realities of self-organization among their people. Isn’t giving autonomy to their teams opening the door to slacking off?

As a leader, you need to find a delicate balance when working with your team. You may have often faced this dilemma: should you tell your self-organized team what to do, or let people do what they want?

What if it was a bit of both?

How to Approach an Autonomous Team

Let’s start with an example: you want to implement a new initiative in your team. As a leader, should you propose a structure or let the team figure out how to create one? At the core, should you even have a structure? Should you instead assume that it will naturally emerge from the group? What is the best approach?

The answer: it largely depends on the maturity of the team and its ability to take on new tasks. If the initiative is brand new, team members might prefer to be guided to help them work together better. On the other hand, a well-established team might be frustrated by having something imposed on them in advance.

Another key thing is team members’ ability to make decisions together. There is a learning process involved in becoming a team. In this case it may be helpful for the leader to provide a structure to get them started.

To understand where your team stands and how to best guide them, it is crucial to have in-depth discussions with them about expectations.

Creating Conversations with Your Team

As a leader, you should clarify what self-organization means in the specific context of your team and your organization. Make sure you arrive at a shared definition. It might also be necessary for you to define some of the initial steps with your team.

What does the team want to focus on, and what do they want to do differently? What do they want to learn first? In which area would they like to gain more power and responsibility?

As a leader, you can guide the change by helping the team determine what they want to learn and setting a timeline for it. You can then encourage team members to give feedback on what they learned. You can set them on the path to a second learning objective, and so on until they are autonomous enough to take charge of the process themselves.

Since every self-organized team operates within a unique context, this raises many questions. What is the team responsible for, and what is it not responsible for? What decisions can the team make? How should the team make these decisions and be accountable for them? What happens if the team fails? What decisions will be made by the management team?

As a leader, you need to take the time to clarify these questions and regularly discuss them with your team to avoid confusion, ambiguity, or frustration among everyone involved.

Developing the Team’s Skills

The ability to self-organize involves both individual and collective skills that you need to develop within your team. Individually, team members need to learn and develop the following abilities.

Individual Skills

• Truly listening to one another
• Communicating in a more structured way
• Establishing mutual support and accountability
• Engaging in healthy debates
• Creating and facilitating meetings
• Designing and facilitating decision-making processes

Collectively, a team must develop the ability to continuously improve its way of working as a unit. Five important factors contribute to effective teamwork.

Collective Factors:

• Psychological safety: "If I make a mistake with my team, it won’t be held against me."
• Reliability: "When my teammates say they’ll do something, they do it."
• Structure and clarity: "Our team has an effective decision-making process."
• Meaning: "The work I do for the team is important to me."
• Impact: "I understand how our team’s work contributes to the organization’s goals."

When people understand these factors and embrace them as a team, their work environment transforms. The structure of the organization and the processes begin to better support the work. Laughter increases, people take more initiative, and leaders find it easier to engage their teams.

Conclusion

Fostering self-organized teams can be either very easy or incredibly difficult, depending on your organizational culture and the seniority of the team members.

As a leader, it is important to work with your teams to help them align on what autonomy really means. You must also support them in their efforts to develop their skills.

This article was originally published on the Technologia blog.