How do you create a self-organized team?

In my experience for the past ten years, one of the buzzwords in the Agile community has been to build self-organized teams. Everyone talks about it, but no one knows how to make a self-organizing team.

It's all about making decisions.

All teams face two types of problems: decision-making and execution.

When the team is not self-organized, someone (we call the manager) makes all the decisions, and the team implements them. Whenever we want to create a self-organizing team, we must delegate some or all of these decisions to the team.

It's a delegation.

Management and leadership books talk about Delegation. But if you have the experience of managing even a small team, you know how difficult this task is in practice. Delegation of any decision depends on two critical factors:

Maturity level

Effects of decision making

Suppose you have an immature team; if you give them too much authority, the team may end up in a chaotic situation and even do the opposite. On the contrary, if you have an experienced and mature team and you don't give them any authority, it will be tedious for them to do things.

How to strike a balance between agency and team maturity

I use a practice called poker delegation to balance the team's discretion and maturity.

There is a lot of "grey space" between being a dictator and an anarchist. Most managers think they have to act like dictators or anarchists. The root of anarchism is from the ancient Greek anarchist, meaning "without a ruler," composed of the prefix an- (meaning "without") and the word Archos (e.g. "leader" or "ruler"). (Wikipedia)

Delegation is a step-by-step process. You hand over authority to other people in a controlled and gradual manner. Additionally, it is highly context-dependent. You want to delegate as much as possible, but chaos can ensue if you go too far.

How to delegate authority in practice

Delegation is not a binary thing that we should delegate or not at once; according to this model, there are 7 Delegation:

Tell: I have decided to be a manager and will tell them.

Sell: As a manager, I make decisions and try to sell them (creating desire).

Consult: I will consult, and then I will decide.

Agree: We will decide together.

Advice: I give advice, but they decide.

Inquire: After they make a decision, I inquire

Delegate: I fully delegate

Describe the current Delegation

The second Delegation is a step-by-step process. You delegate authority in a controlled and gradual manner, depending on the context, but chaos can ensue if you go too far.

The first step in creating a self-organizing team is to map the current Delegation. See the image below:

1- For two or three weeks, record your decisions in one place, for example, "Today I hired a new member for the team" or "Today, I asked the team to implement a new feature."

2- Create a panel or board of options in a tool like Miro

3- Let the team understand the current situation and explain the seven-step delegation model to them.

4- Let them make decisions about future situations; however, you should explain the impacts of these decisions.

5. Review this dashboard During the end-of-sprint retro or review meeting and reconsider the future state. Delegation is a gradual process. You delegate authority to people in a controlled and gradual manner.

The primary goal is to empower the team by delegating as much authority as possible based on the context and maturity of the team. This transparency-building process enhances the team's maturity level.

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