Agile Leader Pattern 5 for Awesome Teams: Enable Self-Organization

You play a role in enabling self-organizing teams.

This post continues the analysis of J. Richard Hackman’s article, The Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork¹. This fifth post in the series focuses on the criticality of enabling self-organization to flourish in teams. Self-organization is complementary to the first four patterns:

Self-organization is not easy to achieve, but it is the best thing you can do to set up a team for success.

Pattern 5 – Enable Self-Organization

Misperception	Reality
The leader makes the team.	Hands-on leaders make a difference, but the optimal impact of a leader is achieved by fostering competent self-organization, launching the team effectively, and coaching in real-time.

We all tend to think that a leader makes the team. We believe that the leader is the hero of a successful team and manages the team to achieve greatness. As it turns out, the hands-on activities of the leaders of a group make a difference to the team. However, the types of activities are different than common belief.

Notably, Hackman states that the leader’s ability to enable the team to competently self-organize accounts for 60% of the variability in the success of the team. Enabling the team to manage themselves is the most powerful service a leader can provide to a team.

The second most effective thing a leader can do is effectively launch the team. This accounts for 30% of the variability in the success of the team.

Finally, a leader’s coaching of the team is only accountable for 10% of the team’s success trajectory¹.

A leader is key to team success but not in the way we typically believe.

Putting It Into Agile Practice

The following Agile principles apply to this pattern from the Agile Manifesto²:

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

How we go about achieving this comes down to serving the team, building up team capabilities, and instituting a solid team launch and onboarding process.

Serve the Team Instead of Managing Them

Go see your team at the place where they work. In other words, be with your team and see their impediments firsthand. This is crucial for serving your team in the right way. Toyota referred to something called Gemba—“the actual place” of work—and encouraged managers to have Gemba Walks³ to see problems firsthand.

Gemba walks are a method of observation and should not be a problem-solving activity or taken as an opportunity to point out problems. This technique is a key means of empathizing with your teams and learning how you can serve them by improving the system within which they work.

Instead of managing your teams within the sprint, let them self-organize around what they can control. If you can switch your focus as a leader to helping the team remove waste that they cannot remove themselves, you will serve your team best. See the prior post, How to Shift Gears to Become an Agile Leader, for an in-depth discussion on this topic.

Build Team Capabilities

As an Agile leader, you must switch your mindset from managing your team to leading your team. As a result, by letting go, trusting your team, and allowing them to take control, they will self-organize if they have the capability to do so. This is a critical point—a team can self-organize only if they have the needed behaviors and skills. Your job as a leader is to support the acquisition of these behaviors and skills.

If your team needs to build capabilities to become self-organizing, you can support this as an Agile leader. Refer to the following posts for in-depth discussions on this topic:

Overcoming the Fear of the Incapable Team – Read for guidance on how you can coach the team to learn new skills
How a Stable Team Grows in Capability – Read to find out how your team can gain new skills organically without changing team composition.
Can Coaching and Self-organizing Behavior Co-exist – Read to discover how your Agile coach can build new Agile beliefs in your team and help them to become self-organizing.

Launch and Onboard for Success

Launching your team for success is supported by the prior patterns for Awesome Teams—Encourage Different Perspectives, Stabilize Teams, Small is Big, and Encourage Face-to-Face Interaction. Additionally, a focus on onboarding is key for launching your team. A solid sprint 0 for your team will include the following readiness activities:

Agile framework, business domain, and technical training
Product visioning, road mapping, and release planning to seed the initial backlog
Team relationship building
Formation of team working agreements, the definition of ready, and the definition of done
Team room configuration
Collaboration on the product technology architecture conceptual design and coding standards
Engineering practice tooling and automation preparedness
Environment setup and configuration

While we prefer stable teams, if it becomes necessary to bring in a new team member, many of these onboarding activities above should be repeated for any team member additions.

Conclusion

The fifth pattern—Enable Self-Organization—shows that managers, through leadership, can enable self-organization to emerge within a team. First, through direct observation of team needs, the leader can remove problems that impede their teams and increase team control and ownership over what they deliver. Second, to enable self-organization, a team must have skills and capabilities, and a leader must support the team in growing these capabilities. Finally, ensuring adequate onboarding of a new team or new team members is a key role of the leader and instrumental to team success.

Our posts to date emphasize the importance of a team having diverse perspectives, stability, a small size, face-to-face interactions, and self-organization.

Stay tuned for the sixth and last post in the series—Serve the Team.

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Agile Leader Pattern 5 for Building Awesome Teams: Enable Self-Organization