Are self-organizing teams better or the same as self-managing teams? What about self-directing teams? Working with teams can be challenging due to change and complexity. So, the idea that we could have self-organizing teams or self-managing teams can sound valuable, scary, or both!
What do these terms mean, and where can they be confusing? Let’s dig into each one.
Self-Organizing Teams
A self-organizing team “self-organizes” to complete the work. Within the team, they commit to the work they believe they can complete, figure out how to get the work done, who will do what, monitor progress, and ensure that the work is complete based on what they have agreed ‘done’ means. The team works through conflict and challenges within the team. When they don’t have the experience or need additional help, they can get this from outside the team—ideally, learning new skills over time. This term has been used and still is when describing an agile team. Of course, it could be used for any team. It doesn’t have to be agile; it could be any team working together to deliver to customers. It is the opposite of a “manager-organized team,” where the manager determines who will do the work, how it is done, and monitors the status.
Self-Managing Team and Confusion
A self-managing team handles typical “management’ tasks (often in addition to doing what a self-organizing team does). These include hiring, firing, performance issues, performance evaluations, etc. When people hear ‘self-managing,’ it is not a giant leap to think it means teams that manage themselves—from daily tasks to hiring, firing, and performance reviews. How many teams have you encountered that handle all of this themselves? Very few? It is challenging to use the term self-managing without people assuming they (the team) are now the managers.
Here is where the confusion comes in. The term ‘self-organizing’ is often confused with ‘self-managing.’ One source of this is a chart entitled “Four Levels of Team Self-Management” (from the American Psychological Association (1986)), which is included in J. Richard Hackman’s book Leading Teams (2002). In the chart and book, self-managing is described as what we think of as self-organizing. Another way to think about it is that a team “self-manages the work.” This sounds a lot like “self-organizes to deliver the work.”
Recently, some have used the term self-managing team to replace self-organizing team. When people hear ‘self-managing,’ it is not a giant leap to think it means teams that manage themselves—from daily tasks to hiring, firing, and performance reviews. How many teams have you encountered that handle all of this themselves? Very few. So, when people use the term self-managing, they often mean a team that self-manages the work.
Most organizations, teams, and team members are not prepared to handle self-management (e.g., team design) and self-organization of work and performance (at least initially).
Here is how I summarize all of this:
- Teams that self-organize to deliver the work or self-manage the work
- Teams that self-manage themselves (Note that the chart and book mentioned above also include a “self-designing team,” which is very similar.)
- Teams that self-direct to decide what to work on (more on this below)
Self-Directing Teams
There are also ‘self-directing teams.‘ A self-directing team creates the list of work. They are not ‘self-organizing’ to determine how to deliver the work they select from the top of a product backlog (via a product manager); instead, they
create the backlog. You see this with entrepreneurs, small companies, research teams, security teams, and larger organizations with dispersed funding (e.g., a university). The alignment of direction comes from within the team. When the team has a central focus, like a security team looking for new threats, there may be a base direction that is ‘automatic.’
There can be challenges without an established direction for this type of team. For entrepreneurs, it is pretty easy to end up not in a self-directing team but in a self-directing group. This happens when each person has a slightly different focus and direction. Over time, the alignment could go either way, depending on what the individuals want to do. I’ve been part of self-directing groups and enjoyed parts of them. The challenges I experienced were based on a lack of alignment on goals and direction. When each person has a different focus, it is tough to find meaningful things to collaborate on or get excited about. You may even introduce impediments and add frustrations for others. While you can certainly try to align, you must realize sometimes people are heading in different directions (which is not good or bad).
There is no shortage of different definitions. So, if you want to use different definitions, that’s awesome! Just be sure everyone agrees on what each term means and realizes that using the term “self-managing” will almost always carry additional implications.
