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How to Create Self-Organized Teams

Author: Jagadesh Subash

Authored by Jagadesh Subash

29 October 2010

How to Create Self-Organized Teams

• In response to marketplace, demands in dynamic and complex environments managers are finding creative ways to structure and organize work as self-organizing teams.
• Leaders employ self-organizing teams to handle the complexity inherent in projects.
• As a team opens to feedback from within and external to team, it generates new structures and patterns based on its own internal dynamics even evolving its own purpose and leadership as the team members interact. These processes are self-organizing.
• Self-organizing teams are cross-functional and there is more flexibility across functional areas of expertise, which ensures maximum utilization of resources and improved learning through collaboration.
• Self-organizing team members embrace continuous learning while effectively achieving team goals, which allows them to not only out-perform themselves but also find better and innovative ways of working. Team goals should have high priority than individual objectives.
• The most important environmental factors include senior management support and customer involvement. Senior management must be able to provide freedom to the teams so that they can self-organize themselves.
• The other important environmental factors include customer support. Customers must support the team members by being actively involved in the development process through providing regular requirements, clarifications, and feedback as required.
• Team members have to build capacity to respond continuously to change. In these systems, Team members shall consider change as the organizing force, not a problematic intrusion. Accurately anticipate resistance to change. Adeptly overcome the resistance through endurance, skill, and determination. Changes are self-generated, not hierarchically driven. Role of senior executives is to remove obstacles hindering the organization's capacity to self-generate.
• It is important to choose team members so that they complement each other's. The team members should be chosen based on technical, team, and leadership skills.
• It is shown that autonomy together with communication and collaboration are the major components for building a self-organizing team. Team autonomy is a signi?cant factor for team effectiveness.
• The degree of empowerment and authority that the team has in order to make decisions in self-organizing teams is greater than the regular teams. There are three levels of autonomy, which are external, internal, and individual, and autonomy at all the three levels shall be present in the team. The individuals spontaneously want to be involved; they are not there because of management decisions.
• Redundancy is incorporate at the individual levels.
• A self-organizing team requires a strong current goal or purpose. It requires continual feedback with its surrounding environment. It requires continual reference to a common set of values and dialoguing around these values. It requires continued and shared reflection around the business processes.
• Shared leadership requires that all the team members actively participate into decision-making.
• Instantiate creativity in the team members by defining the requirement for unpredictable shifts away from normal modes which results in self-organization.
• To influence the conditions that determines the path and outcome of self-organizing in teams.
• Differences in the team provide the potential for change.
• Transforming exchanges connect across the differences in the team to realize that potential.
• Containers hold the team together while change occurs.
• The more constrained each of the conditions, the more predictable are the patterns. The less constrained, the less predictable are the patterns. Containers provide boundaries, center points, and connections. The process of team building also requires transforming exchanges that damp or amplify the differences to feed the process of self-organizing. These media for these connections can be face-to-face conversations, team meetings, email, interactive software, or voice and mail messages. All of the other important factors that affect a team's development are containers.
• The manner in which team frames its purpose, its culture, and its processes provide multiple containers for its self-organizing activities.
• Often in Self-Organizing teams emergent leadership is exhibited by group member emerges and maintains a leadership position. People are attuned to each other so well that, even when separate, they naturally act in harmony with each other and the goals of the enterprise results in collective leadership.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/team-building-articles/how-to-create-self-organized-teams-3609564.html

Mr. Jagadesh Subash is a consummate technically sophisticated senior management professional with experience of 16 years in the information and communication technology industry. Mr. Jagadesh Subash is project management institute certified project management professional. He has worked as senior project manager, project manager, project leader, technical architect, systems engineer in various global it organizations. He had received six-sigma green belt from GE in 2004. He has mentored four six-sigma green belt projects for GE. He has comprehensive industry domain expertise in banking, financial services, manufacturing, aviation, health care-insurance, and contract management domain. He is ISO certified QMS internal auditor. He is a post-graduate in management. (M.S In Management Systems from Birla institute of technology and science, Pilani, India – collaborative program 2002-03).He achieved diploma in business management from institute of management and technology, Ghaziabad – 2001. He graduated in bachelor of engineering in computer science and engineering from Anna University, (1989 – 1993 batches).

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