{"id":2693,"date":"2018-10-21T10:32:46","date_gmt":"2018-10-21T14:32:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog-alexis.monville.com\/en\/?p=2693"},"modified":"2020-11-25T02:52:41","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T07:52:41","slug":"could-your-team-be-managing-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog-alexis.monville.com\/en\/2018\/10\/21\/could-your-team-be-managing-itself\/","title":{"rendered":"Could your team be managing itself?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was engaged recently in a passionate conversation ignited by a simple comment: “A team has to be managed.” The comment made me think I wasn’t on the same page as my interlocutor.<\/p>\n

I was discussing the importance of designing organizational roles that won’t become bottlenecks (roles that won’t prevent the organization from delivering efficiently or to adapting quickly to changes). In classic organization design, we tend to think that designing boxes on an organizational chart and putting great people in charge will solve all our problems. That approach could<\/em> work in static environments, where what you have to deliver is defined once and for all.<\/p>\n

But if your environment is continually changing, you need to adapt your value proposal to those changes. Your organization needs to be adaptable.<\/p>\n

My interlocutor was on the path to designing the boxes<\/em> of a new organization. On his radar were managers that will have full responsibility for certain groups and team leaders with full responsibility of the teams making up those groups. Static groups, static roles, static functions.<\/p>\n

But you can’t achieve a capacity for adaptability in your organization if you rely on overloaded people dealing with multiple responsibilities. I suggested an alternative: Self-organizing teams designed around roles that are not bottlenecks, roles that team members could take either full-time or for a portion of their time.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, my interlocutor jumped to the conclusion that my goal was to remove all managers and team leaders from the organization\u2014as if self-organizing teams and management were somehow mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n

Not exactly.<\/p>\n

Managing the self-organizing team<\/h2>\n

The Open Organization Definition<\/a> lists five characteristics as the basic conditions for openness:<\/p>\n