 ()Value. We all want our time, ideas, and work valued. Organizations desire value from their staff. We measure value in many ways but do not speak about it holistically nearly often enough. Specifically, how valuing the individual can translate to the bottom line. Cultivating a self-managing team is a powerful way to create holistic value in your organization.
I’m using the term self-managing intentionally to reference a team primarily responsible for choosing what they work on and how they do it within larger organizational priorities. Even if your goal isn’t to create a self-managing team, partial adoption of these ideas can significantly improve the quality of your team’s work life and ultimately lead to better results. A word of note: everything I will be writing about is viewed through the lens of a creative team. By creative team, I mean any team responsible for creating something that hasn't previously existed. In my case, that is mostly software. But it would apply equally to arts, content creation, new product development, etc. I look forward to sharing my thoughts on the following topics. Facilitating real change (view post) If you've spent time in the corporate world, you have probably been subject to organizational change training. My experience is that one-size-fits-all approaches never achieve the organizational-level impact they were supposed to. The fundamental flaw with those approaches is that they failed to recognize that change is very individual and personal. And to affect change, you must treat it as such. My graduate work in communication studies also supports this. Foundation of trust (view post) Trust is the cornerstone of everything. You can't accomplish any of this without a solid two-way trust dynamic. Without trust, the inevitable mistakes are rightly viewed with suspicion. And trust is something you must earn every day. Collective accountability and quality (view post) This is one of my favorite areas to address. If you've established enough trust, collective accountability removes an unbelievable amount of stress from the daily life of your team. Quality will shoot through the roof, and the value of what you're trying to accomplish will become apparent. Teaching autonomy (view post) This one is tough. It's hard because most people come with minimal autonomy experience in the workplace. And there's a good chance they would be shut down if they tried to exercise autonomy early in their academic or professional careers. So not only do they not have experience with it, but in many cases, they don't even know it's an option. You can get people there, but you must have trust and cooperation. The power of experimentation This is one area that can be heavily affected by the work environment. However, even within highly structured organizations, there is room for experimentation. For most people in a creative field, doing something new, especially something that's never been done before, is the peak experience they seek. Building the foundation to allow experimentation can alter the trajectory of an individual, team, or organization. Making change permanent with advocacy Even the most introverted person will want to talk about the work of a team that trusts each other, holds each other accountable, embraces change, and is not afraid to try new things. A team that advocates for themselves is the most powerful change agent one can imagine. That advocacy can spread throughout an organization and have impacts far beyond the team from which it originated. Like many managers, I became one because it was the next logical step in my career. It took a while for me to see the importance of empowering individuals and even longer to figure out how to do it. That journey and my current waypoint (there is no destination) have been unbelievably fulfilling. The information I will share in the coming weeks comes from my actual implementation of these principles. I’ll share “names changed to protect the innocent” stories of success and failures. This writing reflects my current thinking, but I am continually evolving, so I welcome your thoughts and questions.
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