Self-Managed Team Alignment
Self-Managed Team Alignment
Self-Managed Teams are fully autonomous teams with little-to-no top-down supervision. They take full responsibility for their results, and they can be temporary or part of the overarching organization.
Tech companies like Google, Facebook, Spotify, and others use them to increase productivity and output at scale, with low overhead, while reducing pressure on managers who may already be stretched thin.
Examples of Self-Managed teams include:
- A software development team assembled to bring a specific product to market
- A sales team made up of members of various regional teams to strategically expand the reach of a company
- And in the 1990s and 80s, self-managed teams transformed American manufacturing, reducing costs spent on service production
Self-Managed Team Characteristics
According to most sources, about 80% of Fortune 500 companies are using self-managed teams in some form (although we had a hard time tracking down the original source for this stat). These teams perform well because they:
- Have more ownership of the end product or result
- Cost less and are more productive because all members of the team take on both technical and management responsibilities
- Make decisions faster and more effectively
- Communicate more often than top-down teams
Self-Managed Team Alignment: Vision
Autonomy is the driving force behind any self-managed team. What an organization must do is define the objectives, parameters, and vision, then get out of the way.
This isn’t easy. There’s a lot of trust involved in allowing a self-managed team to operate.
We’ll dive into the characteristics team members should have in the talent section, but it’s important that each team member is highly aware of the larger company goals, and the vision behind those goals.
Most of the businesses we talk to say that they want to give direction to their team members, and walk away knowing fully that the team knows how to execute, and why.
How To Align Self-Managed Team With The Company Vision
Here is a collection of the most effective vision strategies to use when aligning a self-managed team:
- Make the Mission the Boss – Self-managed teams share managerial tasks across members, with little or no direct supervision from managers. Instead, they make the mission, purpose, and vision the bosses. https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers
- The Jet Engine – “I’ve got a 3-year-old daughter, and I figure that every plane we build engines for has someone with a 3-year-old daughter riding on it.” That’s the purpose a GE electric plant employee in North Carolina tied to their work as part of a self-managed team—what’s the purpose tied to what your organization does?
- The Road To Self-Management – “First, ask everyone on your team to write down a personal mission. Second, look for small ways to expand the scope of employee autonomy. Third, equip every team with its own P&L account. To exercise freedom wisely, employees must be able to calculate the impact of their decisions. The road to self-management is paved with information. Finally, you must look for ways to erase the distinctions between those who manage and those who are managed.”
- Be A Coach – “I always ask these questions from my reports: Is the company vision clear? Are the company goals clear? Do you understand what we’re trying to accomplish and the near-term objectives?” says Mike Seavers, who outlined here how he helped grow the software company Riot Games from a few hundred employees to 3,000
- Your Vivid Vision – A clear picture of what success looks like can do wonders for a team with a high degree of autonomy. As you’ll see in the talent section below, those that make up teams like these are driven, self-starts who are eager to execute. Give them a clear vision of why, and you can instill an incredible level of ownership and productivity.
Self-Managed Team Alignment: Talent
Tony Hseih founded LinkExchange at 23, sold it to Microsoft for $265 million two years later, and became the CEO of Zappos in 2000 when their total sales were $1.6 million.
In 2015, he offered severance packages to all employees who felt the idea of self-management wasn’t a fit.
Most decided to stay, but 18% took the package.
Four years later Zappos reached $1B in revenue.
It’s easy to see why self-managed teams are being used by 80% of Fortune 500 companies because they:
- Reduce operational costs
- Increase productivity
- Improve product quality
- Produce results faster
- Strengthen the culture of a team
The 1990s saw a huge leap in the use of self-managed teams and their ability to to provide a competitive advantage:
- RCAR Electronics reportedly saved $10M a year, Wilson Sporting Goods, saved $5M a year, and the Harris Corporation saved an average of $4.5M
- K Shoes reported a 19% increase in productivity, Sterling Winrtrip had a 40% increase in production, and Kodak Customer Assistance Center showed a 100% increase in profits.
- Texas Instruments, whose return rates dropped from 3% to .3%; Westinghouse, which reported rework down by 50%; and Tennessee Eastman, which ranked first in customer satisfaction among its competitors.
- RCAR reported cycle time as having been reduced by 40%. K Shoes reported that it reduced the time it takes to make a pair of shoes from 12 days to 1 day.
The organizations above achieved this by:
- Empowering teams to continuously improve
- Challenging them to do more with less
- Reducing time spent on delivery
- Increasing teamwork through loyalty
In short: empower your talent to push themselves.
How To Align The Talent Of Self-Managed Teams
Self-management isn’t for everyone. Some people work more effectively with more rigid structure, and find leadership’s direction and feedback makes them more productive. People who do well on self-managed teams usually:
- Take Full Ownership – They have a sense of extreme responsibility over what they produce. They’re natural leaders who are adaptable, and who communicate openly about any missteps or mistakes, and immediately to find a solution.
- Tolerate More Risk – Those missteps or mistakes that do happen are the result of someone who is comfortable with the responsibility of learning as they go. Self-managed teams don’t have someone to direct them every step of the way, so they have to be able to handle stressful situations as a result of making a mistake.
- Communicate Well – Self-managed team members must be able to communicate productively, especially when conflict arises. These teams have the ability to avoid bureaucratic bottlenecks by waiting for decisions to come from above, but that means more friction, which shouldn’t be a problem if a team has the right tools and communication skills.
- Are Growth-Oriented – To perform effectively with a great deal of autonomy, you also need to be self-aware. Most individuals on self-managed teams continuously seek new ways to improve themselves by being hyper aware of how they perform, and how to grow based on feedback.
Effective Talent Strategies For Self-Managed Teams
Once the decision has been made to assemble a team to produce an outcome, the organization can align their talent by prioritizing those with the above characteristics (and any others that may be important). Then, they can use the following strategies as guidance:
- First, Fire All The Managers – The self-management model covered in this Harvard Business Review article gives you everything needed to build an independent team that takes initiative.
- Teams to Tribes – The manufacturing industry has used self-managed teams to great effect for decades, by redefining what a team is.
- Employees Own The Company – A large department store chain in the UK “owns the company 100%” and decides its direction together.
- Example Over Authority – Leadership can’t rely on authority with their self-managed teams—it goes against the organizational ethos, and can hurt performance. Instead, leaders should practice sharing in the responsibility of the team’s output.
- Adjust Your HR Procedures – Acquire star players, keep them motivated, and unleash the potential of your “typical” team members, by taking the Agile approach.
- Let The Team(s) Design & Govern Themselves – Full autonomy? Works for some.
- Google’s “Leader-Leader” Strategy – Google uses self-managed teams to increase productivity and empower their employees to solve problems faster. See how they use a “Leader-Leader” strategy over a “Leader-Follower” model here.
Self-Managed Team
Alignment: Structure
The actual structure of a self-managed team can vary, as there’s usually no traditional hierarchy. Everyone understands how their role fits into the larger goal of the group. For example, a company may assemble self-managed teams for product design that would look like this:
Obviously the big selling point of a self-managed team is no managerial oversight, but that doesn’t always mean the team doesn’t have a lead. The difference, though, is that self-managed teams have a facilitator, who works within the guardrails set by leadership. They’re often referred to as a Servant Leader:
Self-directed Agile teams have the same idea, assigning a Scrum Master whose central role is to facilitate communication and backstage project management:
Other self-managed teams structures, like those used at Zappos and other large companies, the leadership responsibilities are distributed amongst different members of the team; authority belongs to the role, not to the individual.
Google is known for their commitment to cross-functional and self-managed teams, but they haven’t completely done away with management, and instead optimized the role of management to get more done (an engineering lead can facilitate several self-managed teams at one time, exponentially increasing the operational value of the manager).
How To Structure A Self-Managed Team
The self-managed team’s structural approach will depend on the size of the company and the goal of the team. Here’s a list of effective strategies when it comes to strengthening the organizational structure, decision making process, and communication of a self-managed team.
Self-Managed Team Organizational Structure
- Teams Are The Structure – Follow the structure implemented at Zappos, the current holy grail of self-managed team success.
- Hire A Consultant – EOS implementers can help you organize your team around their model, while there are also Agile consultants who can help assist in organizing your self-managed team to function effectively.
- Follow The Farm – Morningstar Farms also has a structure for you to model, so long as you can spot the similarities to their business and yours without getting hung up on the differences.
Self-Managed Team Decision Making Process
- A-B-C Decisions – Again, the engines of democracy provide an excellent foray into how to help even the smallest self-managed teams make decisions.
- Guidelines – Make sure there are clear guidelines in place from the start.
Self-Managed Team Communication
- Conflict Resolution – According to most experts, a solid conflict resolution system will solve almost all of the communication issues within a self-managed team.
- A-B-C Decisions – The decision-making process of the jet engine manufacturing also shows how powerful communication systems can be implemented within these kinds of teams.
- Free To Speak – Without managers, team members tend to be able to speak freely. So long as you have the right models in place, your self-managed team should feel empowered to speak up.
