Self-organized VS self-managed VS self-directed team

Jon Calvo Pascua
2 min readDec 23, 2022

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What is a self-organized team? Do we understand clearly what is this concept? If I should try to summarize I would follow the article made by Brad Appleton in 2009 (yes, 2019):

  • Autonomous: There is no single central decision-making authority. Control is distributed collectively to the team.
  • Adaptive: The team dynamically adjusts as needed across roles, functional specialties, and other boundaries, in order to solve their own problems and improve their own performance.
  • Accountable: The team collectively shares responsibility for results, and members hold each other accountable for outcomes.

Also, another way to visualize or to understand this concept is compare what is a traditional team and agile team

Another concepts that are important to understand are autonomy VS alignment. I like this video from Henrik Kniberg when in 1 minute explain the Spotify’s success.

Another typical question that came from the people is: so, in this case we won’t have managers? I would say that when a dedicated “manager” role disappears, those functions must be spread inside of the team. So, being a self-managed team, requires more effort and more accountability. That’s why sometimes it’s so difficult achieve this level.

Summarizing, we can split in two kind of teams: traditional VS self-organising teams. And inside of being self-organized, we can increase the autonomy depending on the company’s culture. The most challenging example is the self-directed team.

So, in your case, in which stage are you? How is your company? I’m very glad to read your comments :)

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