Technical Leader's Strategic Advantage: Building Self-Managed Teams

Self-managed or self-managing teams have been appearing in more literature and leadership training. Still, the term seems somewhat vague and eerily similar to concepts like holacracy and self-organizing teams, which probably makes you want to roll your eyes. Still, self-managed teams are highly valuable and worth creating and maintaining.

What are self-managed teams?

Self managed teams are teams that operate with an uncommon amount of autonomy. The team is treated as a single unit and allowed to make many decisions that would typically be handled by specific roles.

Now with just that little definition, your mind probably went to wondering if that means they can choose what they work on, who does what job, or what meetings they should and shouldn’t have. In reality, self-managing teams can do some or all of those things. You see, self-managed teams don’t get a blank check for teams to do whatever they want. It is a challenge to allow teams to operate within clearly defined boundaries. Ideally, we grow those boundaries, giving the team more and more areas of responsibility, but that is where your leadership comes in.

Bringing it back, you know you’re working with a self-managed team when they have the authority to act independently of some other role’s permission. If you tell a team to tackle some issue and they go off and figure out how, plan, and execute, then you’re seeing the core elements of a self-managing team.

What are the benefits of self-managed teams?

For a leader, self-managed teams can provoke strong reactions. On the one hand, the teams become more self-directed, which requires less intervention from you as a leader. On the other hand, you aren’t needed in the same way.

If you feel a twinge of doubt that you’d have a role if you aren’t needed, don’t worry. This actually benefits you since those interventions aren’t where your value is. Allowing a team to self-manage frees you to focus on strategic planning and fostering the right environment for success.

When you create and sustain self-managing teams, you’ll start to see some of these benefits:

• Better collaboration - Self-managing teams collaborate on everything so they naturally share information and make decisions together. Any intra-team silos will get destroyed.
• Higher satisfaction - Teams that feel ownership over their work and fate tend to feel more satisfaction at work. This aligns with the autonomy, mastery, and purpose that is featured in the book Drive.
• Higher value delivery - When a lot of effort is put into coordinating, steering, and intervening a team’s delivery, it limits their ability to create options and innovate. This means these teams become little more than assembly-line workers, severely limiting the value they deliver.
• Better health - Consider how much less stress you would feel if you knew that your self-managed teams would accomplish the goal in front of them. You’ll likely be happier and healthier when you have self-managing teams handling the work ahead.

Disadvantages

It isn’t all sunshine and rainbows though. There are downsides to self-managing teams. The following disadvantages can be corrected if you closely monitor these teams as they grow.

• Going off-track - Self-managed teams may choose an impractical or ruinous course of action. This can be challenging to watch. You have to ask yourself, “What do I know that they may not?”
• Uncertainty in reporting - When we trust a self-managing team more with their responsibilities, we may not know that things are going well like we used to. The team may be handling their plans and timelines, leaving you feeling like all you can do is hope.
• Costly Mistakes - Teams that stretch into managing more and more responsibilities will make mistakes as they figure out how to handle new situations correctly. As a leader, you can help by setting clear boundaries and then training them at those boundaries.
• Turnover - Self-managed teams develop a strong sense of purpose and identity that is remarkable. When these teams feel that they are now becoming limited or there is a conflict between words and actions, they may choose to find a new job.

How Leaders Build Self-Managing Teams

Your world as a leader is about to change as you pursue building self-managed teams. As such, your leadership will also have to change along with the team.

Define Boundaries

The most critical step a leader needs to focus on is setting the boundaries within which the team must operate. In the beginning, these boundaries might be quite confining, but they should expand over time. As you look at setting these boundaries, you need to focus on the ones that represent critical or high-risk areas. In other areas, you can work alongside the team to decide what is within and outside their boundaries. Here are some examples of areas you’ll need to set limits on:

• Roles and definitions
• Meetings and meeting attendance
• Compensation
• Scope and deadlines
• Budget
• Architecture
• Tools
• Development process
• KPIs
• Release
• Working with peer teams
• Working with legal, security, etc.
• Escalations
• Team composition

Some of these may seem surprising, but you assumed authority was in one place when it might need to change. Compensation is an easy one to pick on. You need to be clear whether this is within the scope of a self-managing team. It’d be easy for a team to hear they are “Self-managed” and then think they can manage their own promotions. So you must set clear boundaries.

Taper Your Involvement

Once you start to consider creating a self-managed team that can operate autonomously, you’ll begin to see just how many strings are attached to it. Your first set of strings to cut is your own.

Information flow

Look at where you are historically expected to deliver and communicate information to the team and to other groups. Begin to transition those responsibilities to the team over time.

Change your reporting

Next look at reporting structures and artifacts. Work with the team to find out how they can most effectively tell you what you need to know even though they will be making most of the decisions themselves. It is always good for you to be informed and know the details, but traditional reporting may not be the answer any more.

Handle escalations

Finally, focus on how escalations are handled. You may find you need to be present during escalations even if the team will handle it fully. This would happen due to larger corporate norms around responsibilities and you may find it is easier to satisfy the corporate norm by being present even while your team handles everything else.

Attend the Environment

The biggest shift for a leader of self-managed teams is to stop looking at the work and performance but instead to look at the environment the team exists in. Your job as a leader is to create and foster the type of an environment where a self-managed team can thrive.

Your focus should become hearing from the team about the challenges they are having and looking, in turn, at the environmental factors that create those challenges. From there your job is to tweak those factors to continually make the environment more and more favorable.

Let me give a quick example—your company has a meeting of leaders to review overall progress. Ideally, your self-managed team can handle this meeting, but having a team member instead of a leader would shock the organization. One approach could be to limit the need for the meeting by encouraging better collaboration and transparency in the teams. Another could be to attend the meeting as usual, bring someone from the team, let the person from the team do most of the talking, and then fully delegate that meeting.

By paying attention to the stressors that work against self-managing teams, you can help them succeed and grow.

When It Goes Wrong

Let’s face it: Nothing is perfect, nor will the transition to self-managing teams. You will make mistakes, and they will as well. The real question is, what do you do when this day happens?

It’s an opportunity, not a problem

Remember the purpose of self-managing teams. They have the potential to deliver better and help you be a more strategic leader. So when something goes wrong, this is not a problem with self-managing teams—it is an opportunity for you to work with that team to understand what is happening. Most of the time, there will be a communication gap. When you realize this, you can prevent that gap in the future.

Take the opportunity for what it is—a chance to grow this self-managing team further.

Develop clear signals

Because self-managing teams make most of their decisions independently, leaders are unsure if things are actually alright. As part of creating your self-managed team, you will want to develop signals that you and your team agree on that would trigger investigation or intervention.

Some signals could be around performance, progress, stress, feedback, etc. The important thing is that you and the team agree upon these signals and are transparent. That way, when you see the signal, it won’t be a surprise to you or the team. For your self-managed team, this would also ideally trigger a conversation with you since things are now unbalanced.

My guideline for establishing these signals is to start with what is readily available, make them relative, and as few as you can.

Use what is available

Encouraging teams to become self-managing will be challenging for both of you, and asking for new measures and metrics will distract them from their growth. You can foster their growth by not demanding new measures but instead using the ones you have. You can change these when you think it’s appropriate down the road.

Make them relative

There is a tendency to create metrics or signals in absolutes. Most teams treat velocity as an absolute number, like 35 points. When creating signals, we want to move away from those absolutes and instead use relative numbers. If we’re asking about productivity, we want to know what percent our productivity has changed. The same goes for most of our other signals.

When you have these relative signals, it is much easier to see the trend and develop tolerances that would prompt intervention. If they’re absolutes, you have to work a lot harder to figure out what is appropriate.

Few as you can

Starting with as few signals as possible is guidance to prevent overwhelming you or your team. Each signal you choose should directly relate to a set of actions. Too often, people create metrics and signals to scratch an itch of curiosity. We want to avoid that here. The signals we put in place prompt action. If you have a performance signal that goes out of balance, it might prompt the team to come to you or you to go to the team.

Viewed in this light, you don’t need many signals to represent your team’s health and progress, and they will thank you for not adding more work to their plate.

As you and the team grow, you can add more signals, as the others will become easy to manage and produce.

Get Started

Now that we’ve covered what you need to know to create a self-managing team, it’s time to get started.

1. Pick a team that works well with other teams and doesn’t have any truly pressing personnel or performance issues.
2. Develop your set of boundaries to prevent critical risk
3. Share these boundaries and develop the rest of the boundaries needed with the team.
4. Let them execute for a specific timebox of 1-3 months
5. Debrief and review the experience
6. Grow the boundaries

Self-managing teams are a challenge for leadership styles that focus on one-way information flow, top-down power structures, and processes that require constant intervention. However, the payoff is worth it. You will be a leader of a team that can deliver incredible things while you can focus on making the environment of your team healthy and your strategic initiatives.