A team’s performance depends on the individuals’ performances. A team can achieve greater heights if they collaborate and take collective decisions with no external guidance apart from talent.
One of the 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto states that
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.”
Agile Manifesto
Therefore, one of the goals of an agile coach is to help teams become self-organized. A team is the smallest unit for Scrum. A team’s performance affects the product, and the collectively built product increment is the only measure of progress. So, as long as the teams are efficient and self-organizing, the company will thrive and prosper.
Table of Contents
What are Self-Organizing teams?
Self-organization is when the agile team decides how they respond to the challenges. The employees tackle problems on their own without any explicit mandate from the top level. Self-organization works because it puts people in control over their destinies, providing purpose and avenues of self-expression. Of course, it still doesn’t mean that a self-organizing team will not take guidance from management or other stakeholders. Still, unlike the traditional teams, self-organizing teams assume the responsibility of acting.
Self-organizing systems may initially be in a disorderly state and have local interactions without any external guidance. But with proper training, guidance, time, and some experience, they emerge into an orderly state.
Just because self-organizing teams make decisions independently, it doesn’t mean that such teams work in silos. In fact, Agile aims at building better collaboration between cross-functional teams. Furthermore, self-organizing teams don’t lack leadership, constraints, or individual performance expectations.
Characteristics of Self-Organizing Teams
How does a self-organizing team look like? Such a team does not wait around for a manager to assign work. The team knows their responsibilities very well and is good at finding the work on their own. Now, let us see some of the important characteristics of self-organizing teams.
Independent: Individuals in self-organizing teams are accountable for their work. They make collective decisions to fulfill that accountability by deciding How, When, Who, With & What of the tasks. However, it is important to know that such independence is not absolute. There are still managers to take care of product priorities, organizational (and external) boundaries, team composition, team norms, DoR & DoD.
Commitment & Ownership: A self-managing team is committed to the shared goals. The members exhibit a sense of collective accountability and ownership towards their work, including success and mistakes. They maintain discipline while encouraging discussions among the diverse ideas each team member has.
Collaboration & Teamwork: Even though each member has pre-defined roles and responsibilities, working together always brings new perspectives to the table. The members are willing to work with new people. Collaboration and communication with cross-functional teams, be it Horizontal Communication, Vertical Communication, or Cross-Directional Communication, a self-organizing team is good at it. They also know how to tackle conflicts with management.
Empirical Mindset: It is important to have an empirical mindset for individuals in self-organizing teams. They maintain transparency by being aware of others’ progress. This helps in moving the project and achieving the shared goals. Self-organizing teams are adaptive, open-minded, and flexible when helping with each other’s tasks, ideas, challenges, and progress. This builds an environment of mutual respect, trust, support, and encouragement.
Self-Motivation: Focus is the key. When each member is focused on the iteration goals, the whole team becomes organized and determined to do whatever work to meet the goals. This habit of intrinsic motivation and self-determination comes from doing meaningful work, going out to find your own work, and setting your own timeline.
Competency: Having the capacity to get a job done is one thing but having enough confidence in your capabilities is important. The team members exhibit confidence in one’s own competency and in that of other team members. As there is no manager to give clear direction and instructions at every step, confidence in the team’s skills and qualities goes a long way in accomplishing the tasks.
Continuous Improvement: To maintain efficiency and performance over time, a self-organizing team needs to improve individuals’ skills. The team members constantly seek new opportunities for growth and upskilling, thus increasing overall productivity.
To demonstrate these characteristics, team members need to have specific agile skills. Learn more about the top five such skills in this article.
Benefits of Self-organizing Teams
What emerges from self-organizing teams? First, the purpose and the control motivate the team members, resulting in better efficiency and innovation. Let us learn more about the benefits of having self-organizing teams in a company.
Less time on management: A self-organizing team is good at assigning their own tasks and tracking their progress. There is no need to hire managers for tasks like delegating work, managing deadlines, checking each employee’s work status, etc.
Increased efficiency: As less time is spent on project management, you can spend more time solving problems and completing the project, thus resulting in increased speed of delivery. They are also able to respond to any market fluctuations quickly.
Improved problem solving: The reduction of micromanagement helps in problem-solving. An environment of asking questions, team discussions, mutual support system, sharing ideas – improves the problem-solving ability of the whole team.
Employee satisfaction: When employees have the freedom to choose their own tasks, select their own path, set their own schedules, decide deadlines with lesser micromanagement – it improves their satisfaction. This, in turn, improves their performances, productivity and facilitates continuous learning.
How To Build Self-Organized Teams?
Building a self-organized team takes time and involves some key steps.
- The first step involves picking out the right mix of responsible people who are disciplined to work without constantly being told what to do.
- A cross-functional team with all the necessary skills can gradually grow into a larger team.
- Training the team members to understand what it means to be a self-organized team. This stage includes soft skills training for better collaboration with the team members and also the higher management levels.
- Initially, a coach is present to guide the members to collaborate at every step. Gradually, the role of the coach diminishes when the team members learn to be more self-organized.
- Even after a team becomes good at self-organization, it may still need some mentoring. Mentoring helps the team to grow skills together and maintain a balance.
As identified by Bruce Tuckman, a self-organizing team also goes through the four phases of team building; Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. Read more about these stages, how the team behaves in each of these stages, and the kind of leadership and coaching required during each stage in this article.
Another critical aspect of self-organizing teams is that they are inevitably cross-functional. As a team, they have all the skills that they need to deliver valuable increments every iteration. Building a cross-function team brings immense benefits. Read more about how to successfully build such cross-functional teams in this article.
What are the main responsibilities of a self-organizing development team?
A self-organized team has many responsibilities. When it is a development team, they share some of the responsibilities of a manager in a non-self-organized team and others. Let us see some of them.
- Be accountable and responsible for both creating a quality product and owning it.
- Update the daily progress with the stakeholders.
- Plan and execute the Sprint Backlog. Reorder them when necessary.
- Share the estimated time to complete the tasks.
- Follow all the Scrum and other agile rules and principles.
What are the biggest challenges for companies starting self-organizing teams?
The question arises if leadership is irrelevant. The role of managers changes in the case of self-organized teams. They guide the teams through stages of maturity, help with conflicts in management, motivate and support to grow their skills and set norms and benchmarks to expand their capabilities. Let us see more about the challenges faced by companies when they start self-organizing teams.
- In the beginning, the absence of managers might cause the members to fall back to old traditional ways.
- It becomes difficult for the team members to collaborate when there are different personality traits among them. Not everyone is good at social interaction.
- The biggest problem is when the team members do not have the proper skill set and are not cross-functional. Having a limited skill-set will reduce the efficiency of the team.
- The whole idea of self-organizing stands on communication. Ineffective communication channels especially between geographically dispersed teams will cause a hindrance.
- As most of the members need to participate in meetings almost daily, this might be a little consuming and thereby reducing individual productivity.
- Adjusting to a new way of working and honing the required skills takes time. If there are any non-persistent team members, they may impact the team’s stability.
- In self-organizing teams, decisions are not taken by one single person. Having a traditional role-specific dominance will hinder the growth of the talented team members in turn reducing the team’s performance.
- Lack of team maturity, lack of sense of shared purpose, and fitting self-organization with other operations are some of the other challenges faced.
The pros and cons of having self-organizing software development teams without a supervisor
No matter how good the idea of self-organization is, it is not devoid of disadvantages. But let us see both the pros and cons to have a better understanding.
Pros:
- Developing code to meet the requirements can be done faster.
- It becomes easier to make informed decisions on best practices by having discussions.
- There is no unfamiliar person regarding coding to put pressure on the team.
- Other team members can share the workload, fill in during sickness or holidays.
- Decision-making is spread among the team members opening doors for alternative and better methods.
- Team members can manage their own Time-scheduling and deadlines thus increasing their productivity.
- More opportunities for creativity and ideas of the team members.
- Team members can hire new members or coaches on their own.
- Better team spirit, trust, and respect among the members.
Cons:
- Some might be too lazy and not self-motivated.
- People who always need someone to micromanage them suffer in this environment. This affects the performance of the team and product development.
- Having too many decision-makers may slow down the process.
- If the members are not supportive of each other, ideas and creativity suffer.
- There might be more focus on groupthink which might hinder an individual’s idea.
- Sometimes not having someone to put pressure on might slow down the projects in meeting the deadlines.
Conclusion
For a team to become self-organized and sustain it, keeping the team together for a considerable time without changing its composition is important. A team needs time to build, grow and become a better version of itself.
