This is for those with experience at creating self-organising teams. When can you accurately state that a team is self-organising? An how long does it take to reach this status?
Grant HamelMr RTE Agile Passionate| The Coventry Building SocietyBanbury, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
We know that the form, storm, norm and perform model is cyclic, yet is it weeks, months or years for a team to become self-organising and high performance? Does it depend on the leader, or manager? And what does it take to maintain such a team? Saving Changes...
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Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
First of all, is critical to understand what self-organising mean. If you are asking this because Scrum then the answer is inside the Scrum Guide. The definition is "Self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work". That´s all. But it did not began with Scrum. People like me and others used this type of things for long time before. To state about other model you can find CMU SEI TSP for example. Second, I can write a lot about the matter at least for me personal experience, but the key point to work when you try to implement this, at least what worked for me, is: 1-defined the concept of "client". In my case what works is taken one of the defintions from quality: client is the next in the process chain. 2-work a lot on trust. In my actual work place we use Steven Covey "Speed of Trust" method to work on that but honestly it has no sense to spend lot of money on that with the exception you need to push it harder. 3-Integrity is a must. An Integrity start from the leaders (being managers or not). Integrity mean "lead by example". 4-about the time, in my case, is hard to put time because I am working in multi-cultural virtual highly distributed team and as you know the culture (country culture) is the magic ingredient to create self-organizing teams. Saving Changes...
Luis BrancoCEO| Business Insight, Consultores de Gestão, LdªCarcavelos, Lisboa, Portugal
Dear Grant Interesting your question Thanks for sharing
If you use Stephen R. Covey's proposals in "Speed of Trust: One Thing That Changes Everything"
and
David Silverman, Chris Fussell, Tantum Collins and Stanley A. Mcchrystal in "Team Of Teams" New Rules Of Engagement For A Complex World "I am convinced that teams can be self-organizing
I am convinced that a shared purpose is important
It's not overnight you can do that Saving Changes...
Thomas WalentaGlobal Project Economy ExpertHackenheim, Germany
Grant,
not sure if the Tuckman ladder is cyclic, I have seen it with new teams to be sequential, only if many new members are added on the flight it may revert back to storming.
in practice, I rather use the 5 tribal leadership stages by David Logan as a model how to build teams. The stage 5 would be when a team is self-organizing and management better gets out of the way or sticks to servant leadership. In this model, each of the stages is also dependent on the situation, so when a project or phase ends, the team might revert back to a lower stage. It is not cyclic either. Saving Changes...
Self-organizing is less about Tuckman's ladder and more about the supporting environment encouraging self-organization.
If the prevailing departmental or company culture is already supportive of self-organization and if they are hiring folks who are used to working in that way, it can be a fairly short timeframe which would align well with getting from Norming to Performing.
On the other hand, if the concept is new to the company, there is a prevailing low level of psychological safety, and there isn't good leadership support for encouraging the cultivation of self-organization, it might never happen.
