Self-Directed Teams: Rubbish or Advantage?
The idea of self-directed teams is not new. It has been used for decades. Why would anyone want this? Does this work for everyone? How is it implemented? Is the traditional hierarchical model bad?
Hierarchical model
The desire to have self-directed teams come from various frustrations that the traditional model generates. Employees do not like to be micro-managed. If they see a more efficient or pleasant way to accomplish the exact same result, they do not want a supervisor to tell them that it’s wrong and that they should do exactly as they’re told. The traditional model breaks a process down into individual steps and assigns isolated tasks to team members, preventing any sense of accomplishment. This creates silos, repetitiveness and boredom. As a consequence, motivation goes down along with efficiency and loyalty. This in turn infuriates the management that seeks to increase control even further. But that cycle can be broken.
Self-directed model
This model has both advantages and disadvantages. Because the team no longer has somebody managing them each day, members have freedom of methodology as long as they can deliver the promised results. They can now organize their own time. This means more empowerment and motivation. Management not only benefits from increased efficiency, but also the team can now solve its own problems without exterior involvement.
On the other hand, these teams are hard to establish. Team members require a strong commitment to the company or this will not work. You will also have to invest in initial and ongoing training. Team members will have to learn management, decision making and problem solving skills. They must also understand the job of other members. Not everybody has the capacity or experience to make tough decisions. Not everybody can have a business perspective. Not everybody is willing to be held accountable for results or mistakes. Conflict resolution can be difficult in such teams and it is important to have exterior support in such situations.
The best of both
Interdependence and accountability are characteristics that are shared with light teams, also called agile. But these teams are not necessarily self-directed. In reality, the problems in all teams arise from applying any model without applying common sense. You want your people to be motivated and efficient? That’s easy.
They have to be result-driven. As a project manager, stop worrying about methodology, control or silly timesheets. Focus on results. You can’t ask your people to be pragmatic if you are not, and if you’re watching and judging their every step. Make sure that everyone understands the job of other team members and report to each other rather than reporting only to you. Don’t split tasks with strict boundaries because you want interdependence and accountability to flourish. Above all, apply your common sense rather than following a work methodology religiously. See what works best for your team and build on these strengths.
I’d just like to thank you for a well written, concise article.
They are different tools, with different requirements and situations where they are appropriate. For example if you take a group of highly skilled and experienced people and try to force them to follow lots of rules and stop thinking for themselves you will be wasting their value. But if you take a bunch of inexperienced trainees and tell them to self-organize to reach the goal, you will have to do a lot of management.
On Friday I participated in an eye-opening demonstration of how a team can self-organize. With a group of 15 people, we started with a simple task that took us 45 seconds to do the first time and got it down to 1 second by the end. After each attempt the person leading the exercise would say “These are the two rules. Can you do better than last time while following those rules?”. This was possible because everyone could see what was happening, everyone listened to suggestions from others, there was no appointed leader, there was no politics within the group, and if we made a mistake we just corrected it tried again without pointing fingers. In fact it was a fun challenge.
It’s not always practical to work this way. We can learn lessons from it but we have to adapt them to our own environment. For example in development it can be difficult to see everything that everyone is doing, which adds a barrier to self-organizing teams.