How can you build a self-managing and autonomous team?

In my opinion the most important is to involve your entire team (even if it is a big unit) in the strategy definition process from the very beginning. What I saw working pretty well is a real collective process to align on every strategical aspects of a department. Starting by collecting info on what should be the focus of the next year(s) through workshops, 1-1 with very diverse people and not only your management team, survey to collect feedback, events with open and unfiltered Q&A, customers workshops. Then everyone should still be involved for the goals definition, agreement on KPIs/OKRs, redefining the strategic objectives with some last iterations. Once you do that, execution will be faster and smoother since everyone will buy in.

In my experience, I have found that the first step to building a self-managing and autonomous team is to define the vision and goals clearly and emphasize effective communication. By consistently expressing the purpose, direction, and expectations, team members gain a comprehensive understanding of their work's significance and alignment with the organization's mission and values. Establishing this shared vision encourages motivation, fosters a sense of direction, and empowers individuals to take ownership of their tasks, leading to a more self-sufficient and successful team.

In my experience, a good balance of delegation and providing well balanced and consistent feedback and advice works very well. Regularly scheduled check-in conversations with the staff and the team helps everyone stay on task, while allowing space for everyone to be creative and problem solve independently.

It starts with appreciation and fairness. Every team member needs to feel valued and respected for their contributions and opinions. This builds trust and collaboration among team members. Next, you need to clarify the goals and expectations for each team giving them autonomy and authority to decide how to achieve those goals and measure their progress. Finally, you need to provide meaningful feedback and effective communication. Self-managing teams don't need constant supervision or direction, but they do need support and recognition. You should also encourage open and honest communication within and across teams to share information, ideas, and best practices.

In my opinion, in order for the team to know where to go, they should be informed. Just like the captain of a mountain climbing group who shows the group with his finger the tip of the mountain they want to conquer. The worst case is that the manager does not know what he wants. Or that he knows what he wants, but the team members think he doesn't know what he wants.

Creating an adult to adult culture is absolutely essential.? Remove the?hierarchical "I'm more important than you, I'm too important to talk to you" nonsense.? Be clear about your destination, give your people the knowledge and tools to get you there, and then let them get on with it. Treat them as the fully grown, mothers, fathers, sons or daughters that they are. We're all equals in life, people just get paid to make different decisions at different times.

When team members have the autonomy to make decisions and take actions within their roles and responsibilities, they can act more swiftly and confidently. This enables them to respond to challenges and opportunities without the need for constant supervision or approval, fostering a sense of ownership and accountability. However, it is essential for leaders to strike a balance and ensure that delegation is done in a thoughtful and strategic manner. It involves assessing the capabilities and readiness of each team member and aligning their responsibilities accordingly. Additionally, providing ongoing support, feedback, and resources is crucial to empower team members and ensure their success.

The first step to a fully autonomous team is to give as much meaningful authority and responsibility away. This should be incrementally and relative to each member's ability. In time, you should be able to remove yourself from the daily ongoings of the team and feel little impact. This is the first sign of being on the right track.

Assess the team. Assess them for their individual strengths, perspectives, insights and expertise. Everyone can add value. Once assessed, delegate responsibility and authority. Coach the team members along the way as needed. Give meaningful feedback to the each of the team members. Support the team members in their decisions and execution. Encourage them when they use creativity and innovation to achieve the goal. If there is a failure in the process, redirect them while assuring them that they as an individual are not the failure. Fail forward fast, adjust as required and stay on course! Give credit to the team members and watch their growth as leaders!

Creating a Psychologically Safe place at work is critical before we delegate the authority and responsibility. Our culture needs to be such that it facilitates growth by being fearless in admitting mistakes and saying "I don't know this" - thus enabling them to learn from others. Adopt a coaching approach whereby we ask appropriate questions so that our teams can find out the answers that work and support each other in the overall development. Allow them to make mistakes while stepping in appropriately to handhold them, thus preventing costly mistakes. Earn the trust of your team so that they love working for you and for the organization.

Team with adequate support and resources cares more about the success of team/organization. It creates a sense of ownership within the team, eventually they would require less supervision and will lead to more efficiency.

O crescimento de uma equipe exige comunica??o constante e treinamento. Muitos dos aspectos necessários para os processos e rotinas do dia-a-dia em uma empresa n?o se aprende na escola. A gest?o do tempo, a organiza??o da agenda, os preparativos para uma reuni?o, s?o exemplos de a??es que exigem conhecimento. Por isso, as empresas precisam ampliar seu pensamento de focar, somente, em metas e resultados financeiros, e proporcionar uma melhor condi??o de trabalho para seus profissionais. Isso quer dizer uma lideran?a que permita a autonomia de seus colaboradores, apoio e treinamento em ferramentas de produtividade e organiza??o do trabalho, com tecnologias variadas.

Leader must ensure team is completely empowered to have access to all required resources, information or required inputs, manpower, machinery to achieve outcomes. Team must be regularly coached, mentored, given required guidance, proper training are provided. Acknowledging good work and appreciating through reward and recognition becomes very important also to create competing spirit within teams.

To build a self-managing and autonomous team by providing support and resources, follow these steps: Assess Team Needs: Understand the specific needs and requirements of your team members to provide targeted support and resources. Identify Necessary Resources: Determine the tools, technology, training, and other resources required for the team to perform effectively. Invest in Training and Development: Offer training programs, workshops, and skill-building opportunities to enhance the capabilities of team members. Provide access to online courses, seminars, and certifications as needed. Provide Access to Information: Ensure that team members have access to relevant information, data, and documentation to make informed decisions.

In my opinion, you cannot send soldiers to war with empty hands and expect victory. A football team cannot enter the field without sports shoes because it will lose against the opponent. Managers should also constantly strengthen their team in terms of facilities because this is not an expense, but an investment in the quality of work.

A team that eats together stays together. While eating, we share our personal stories and share food. Being vulnerable leads to a psychologically safe environment. Such team members become better at collaboration. As a leader, channel positivity by encouraging collaboration, and cohesiveness among team members. Build a team wherein a leader is not needed and that is how the team becomes autonomous.

Encouraging collaboration is essential to foster relationships and inter dependency. Create a Forum for such collaborations and demonstrate how they themselves can decide the subjects to be discussed and seek support from each other. Role model such collaborations and check the readiness of each of the team members to stand in for others in case of a necessity. Thus develop powerful leaders for tomorrow!

Collaboration between teams becomes very useful to share learnings across and have knowledge sharing to bring effective outcomes and learn from others mistake. It even helps in efficient usage of resources. As a leader we must allow free flow of communication to break the silos between team and as an organisation all teams should work in tandem.

In my opinion, small goals should be defined to reach the main goal. By doing this, every time the group reaches small goals and conquers them, we can create small joys together. To finally reach the main goal and have that time of great happiness together.

High degree of collaboration and communication provides “different perspective” leading to different problem-solving skills. Image your team is trying to solve a complex problem and it becomes easy once you have different perspectives and different way of looking things. Organization can achieve more with the same team with high degree of collaboration and communication. Talent might win a game, but it requires a team to stand together to win championships.

In my opinion, until we can write our work on paper and index it to do it, we cannot be aware of the progress or regression of the work. By extracting KPI in each work process and checking it in the designated periods, we can find out which part of the organization is lagging behind and strengthen it.

Monitoring the progress and results here should not be used as something negative in terms of if the employee did not do well, you will jump into the decision of firing them without knowing actually the reason. Monitoring progress and results here means that you give your team a clear vision of what you are expecting and what is expected from them and also give them the visibility on how you are going to evaluate their performance and progress and by that you will be creating a very self-managed and autonomous team.

If you want desired results, you need to do dip check at multiple intervals. Close monitoring helps in ensuring actual performance of team is aligned to goal and would also help to make required correction, give suggestions, tweak actions where required. Feedback becomes very important for improvment of team. Constructive feedback given in a manner which is focusing on both positives and areas of improvement really helps in bring positive results and is also motivating. There should always be carrot and stick approach to reward high performers and also low performers get to perform.

Establish clear performance metrics and benchmarks to measure progress against the tasks or projects. That will allow the team to understand how far or close they are to delivering the agreed strategy. This will additionally help identify what areas need improvement or more resources etc.

A very important reminder is to always define what, where, who, and how to measure the progress and sharing in simplistic format. The story should be direct and celebratory of good or bad. Open feedback questions fester team strengths and identity weakness to improve. Measurements are so important to understanding

Creating an environment of open feedback and transparency will help build self-managing and autonomous teams who have the authority to provide each other with ideas for improvement at all levels, to feel empowered to take action and measure results together. Encouraging everyone to provide their thoughts to each other on how processes and outcomes can be continuously improved will lift the entire team up and help the organization be successful. Show all contributors -- individuals, managers and leaders -- that their ideas and work add value, that you are open to listening to them to do better as a whole.

Questioning existing process, workflows, methods to further simplify, automate and re- engineer complete end to end workflows, ways of working is key to bring further efficiencies and staying relevant and competitive in fast changing dynamic environment. There is need to create seperate task force from within team which is always questioning critically on following - existing processes, conducts surveys, does benchmarking with peers, does analysis and detailed market research on best available product, features, comparison with existing, taking clients feedback etc and then brings out the best version and process for products. Continuous improvement must be brought in with close involvement of top leadership engagement.

Encourage a culture of innovation and experimentation within the team. Ask for feedback from team members and stakeholders to identify areas for improvement. Implement feedback loops and processes to adapt strategies and workflows accordingly.

Faciliter l'amélioration continue est indispensable : HUMAINEMENT : - le manager continue de montrer de l'intérêt pour ses collaborateurs, - permet de continuer à les valoriser en les maintenant dans une position d'experts dans leur domaine COMMERCIALEMENT : - cela permet d'augmenter, maintenir ou renforcer les compétences et/ou leur autonomie, - cela permet aussi de s'adapter aux éventuels changements - et cela permet bien évidemment de tendre vers l'objectifs des résultats attendus.

PDCA (Plan Do Check and Act) is one simple formula which works almost every time. A team, which carries this DNA, is bound to bring in a culture of continuous improvement.

An important aspect to consider is the Timeline. How long can a self-managing team run in the same state? For a self-managing team, there is a good chance that the absence of leadership elements can be felt at a certain time frame. The key factor will be how can these elements be substituted? One great way to keep the motivation and accountability running is to proportionate the incentive/remuneration with performance and this should also be coupled with interdependence. So in this way the individuals are driven for goals and the interdependence will catalyze for cohesion.

What is more important is the journey to achieve this and not really the objective. And to start with, trust is the biggest factor to play to your side. Trust in the team, focus on development of each individual of your team and monitor on the deliverables so that you don’t slip off.

Find opportunities to showcase the good works of the team. Don’t underestimate the need to praise team members regularly - it is nice to hear it once in a while.

When putting a team together, look for people with strong technical & personal skills with good attitudes. Have clear objectives and timelines. Have continuous set update sessions. Give the leader of the team the authority to make decisions and act quickly where necessary. Have open communication and an understanding that when warranted, guidance and support will be given.

A team by definition means self-managing and autonomous only. Just that they understand their ownership. Owning not the tasks, but the results. Any team has black, white and grey areas of responsibilities. It works well when members reach out to each other and collaborate. Just that right tools for it need to be given. They define goals themselves, just that the expectations has to be set. They monitor themselves and improve, just that the org KPIs need to be matched with the teams. So the fundamental is to build a team with ownership, capable of handling that ownership.