A leader's role in self-managing teams

In the business world, where concepts like Management 3.0 and self-managing teams are increasingly discussed, many leaders are questioning their role. If their team manages itself, what will they become? Will their organization still need them? The answer is yes—the world will always need co-creative leaders!

Going Back to the Basics of Management

Let's take a moment to consider what management really is. As a leader, your job involves tasks like:

• Staying focused on goals and needs.
• Setting priorities.
• Creating an effective work environment, which means understanding the different tasks of team members and helping them accomplish them better.
• Guiding team members, for example by advising them on how to perform a task.
• Encouraging team members to give their best.
• Having a strategic vision of the team, by recognizing each member's strengths and weaknesses.

When you read the tasks listed above, you probably noticed that both you and your team handle some of them. That is a good thing! As a leader, you do not have to do everything.

Even if your teams are becoming more autonomous, team members cannot handle all these management tasks on their own.

Your role remains to support them in their development and create the conditions for their success while ensuring the company's goals are met. The next question to ask is: how do you share management responsibilities within the team?

A Word About Self-Organization

Essentially, self-organization means that the team has a certain level of decision-making power. The team contributes to creating a vision and bringing it to life. It takes ownership of how it works, finds its own solutions, and evolves with a mindset of continuous improvement.

This approach leverages the collective intelligence of your team. It means that your team actively participates in carrying out management functions with you.

This includes how they organize themselves and hold each other accountable. It’s more than just a change in human relationships—it’s a change in the structure of the system and the organization itself.

Leading a Self-Managing Team

Autonomy or self-organization doesn’t mean that the leader lets the team make all the decisions. The team may not yet be ready or willing to take them all. You need to help them develop the necessary skills to take on this role.

However, the key to self-organization is having a clear framework within which your team can work. The reality is that your teams operate within the context of a business, where there are responsibilities for managers to achieve the organization’s goals.

There has to be clarity for the teams—a sandbox for self-organization to be possible. Within this sandbox, the team should have as much decision-making power as possible to take ownership of their work, without you becoming a bottleneck.

When the team wants to make decisions outside the sandbox, it is your role as a manager to point this out and bring the team back into the sandbox. You need to clarify with your team which decisions they can make and how you will be involved in certain other decisions.

And Your Role as a Leader in All This?

Being the manager of a self-managing team means being a more collaborative and less directive leader with your team. You need to find new approaches to leading your team without trying to control them or bring all the new ideas yourself.

Your role as a leader is to be business-focused when speaking with your team. You can share the requirements with them and then give them the freedom to self-organize to meet objectives. If necessary, you can also advise them on how to proceed. As a leader, the business objective becomes a sort of anchor point for you to hold the team accountable for results.

How they choose to meet the requirements is up to them, but they must do it. It is important for you to be clear about the objectives the team needs to meet and to have regular conversations to ensure everyone is aligned.

Conclusion

Empowering your team is a great opportunity to broaden your leadership perspective. In reality, you need to learn to collaborate differently with your team. You need to change your leadership perspective, learn to build your team's capacity, and teach them how to experiment in a structured way.

It is also crucial that you create conversations that allow your teams to discuss and find solutions to their own problems.

This is the only way you can create a work environment that motivates your teams and maximizes the use of the collective intelligence already present in your organization.

This text was originally published on the Technologia blog.