Back to the basics of management
Let's go back to the basics of management for a moment. As a manager, your job involves the following tasks, among others:
Staying focused on objectives and needs.
Setting priorities.
Creating an efficient work environment, i.e. understanding the different tasks of team members and helping them to carry them out.
Coach team members, for example, by advising them on how to perform a task.
Encourage team members to give their best.
Have a strategic vision of the team, its strengths and weaknesses.
As you've read through the tasks above, you've probably noticed that you do some of them, and that your team does some of them too. And that's a good thing! As a leader, you don't have to do everything.
So, even if your teams are becoming more autonomous, team members can't do all these management tasks.
Your role remains to support them in their development and create the right conditions for their success, while ensuring that the company's objectives are met. The next question is: how do we share management within the team?
A word about self-organization
Essentially, self-organization means that the team has a certain level of decision-making power. The team contributes to creating a vision and making it a reality. It takes ownership of the way it works, finds its own solutions and evolves through a mindset of continuous improvement.
This approach draws on your team's collective intelligence. This means that your team actively participates in carrying out management functions with you.
This includes how to organize and hold each other accountable. It's more than a change in human relationships, it's a change in the structure of the system and the organization itself.
Leading an autonomous team
Autonomy or self-organization does not mean that the leader lets the team make all the decisions. They may not yet be ready or willing to make them all. You need to help them develop the skills they need to take on this role.
However, the key to self-organization is to have a clear framework within which your team can work. The truth is that your teams operate within the context of a business, and within that context, there are responsibilities that must remain those of managers, including those related to achieving the organization's objectives.
There must be clarity for teams; a sandbox within which self-organization is possible. Within this sandbox, the team must have as much decision-making power as possible around their work, without you becoming a bottleneck.
When the team wants to make decisions that are outside the sandbox, it's your role as manager to point this out to the team and bring them back into the sandbox. So you need to clarify with your team what decisions they can make, and how you can get involved in certain decisions.
And what about your role as leader?
Managing an autonomous team means being a more collaborative and less directive leader of your team. You have to find new ways of leading your team, without trying to control them or bring in every new idea.
Your role as a leader is to focus on the business objective when you talk to your team. You can share the requirements with them and then give them free rein to self-organize to achieve them. If necessary, you can also advise them on how to proceed. As a leader, the business objective becomes a kind of anchor for you to hold the team accountable for its results.
How they choose to meet the requirements is up to them, but they have to do it. It's important for you to be clear about the goals the team needs to meet, and to have regular conversations to make sure everyone is aligned.
In conclusion
Empowering your team is a great opportunity to broaden your leadership perspective. In reality, you need to learn to collaborate differently with your team. You need to change your perspective on leadership, learn to build your team's capacity and teach them to experiment in a structured way.
It's also vital that you create conversations that enable your teams to discuss and find solutions to their own problems.
Only in this way can you create a work environment that motivates your teams and maximizes the use of the collective intelligence already present in your organization.
What can you do to help your team overcome the challenges of empowerment?
Management 3.0: The Agile Leadership Techniques
