Empowerment, Not Self-Organization

Have you heard people say something to the effect of, “Self organization is not really entirely self organization”?

I have. Many times.

And it is always when I challenge the idea of self-organization as an effective strategy for creating high performing teams.

There is a huge amount of research on team performance. One of the giants of that research is Amy Edmondson of Harvard. Her work began with the study of medical teams, and branched out to the study of organizations. In her recent book Teaming, she explains how the behaviors of individuals make effective teams possible.

In the teams she studied, there was almost always a team lead. In the context of medical teams, it was usually the physician leading the team or leading a procedure. There were also specialists, such as anesthesiologists and other specialists related to the procedures being performed. People had roles.

What made teams effective, according to Edmondson, is when they were transparent about outcomes. This stems from the culture of the team: its inclination to approach its work intellectually and try to learn. That kind of team culture is generated by the team lead and the organization’s culture.

Are such teams self-organizing? The term means that there is no structure defined for the team a priori. So in a truly self-organizing team there is no team lead initially, and the team does not begin with any roles. A team lead will likely emerge over time, and roles might form. Also, no one from outside the team intervenes in any way — if they did, the team would only be partially self-organizing, but not entirely, and so to describe it as self-organizing would ignore the potentially critical impact of external intervention.

Intervention is often crucial. People with experience often need to explain things to team members — things that the team members don’t know that they don’t know. Interpreting and explaining situations is a form of leadership.

Experienced and effective team leads and managers teach, mentor, and coach their people. Experienced people often have wisdom, and it is important to share it. Mentoring someone might also entail assigning them to specific roles, possibly on another team. Ideally this should be with their agreement, but an effective leader will realize the need and propose it, possibly advocate for it.

In our leadership program, one of the many leadership models that we examine is the model of psychologist Daniel Goleman. His model identifies six key leader behaviors, and one of them is “pace setting”, whereby a leader sets an aggressive pace for a team — pushing them beyond where they would normally go. In the leadership model known as Path-Goal Theory, this is known as achievement-oriented leader behavior. Left to their own, most people will set goals that are easily met, but that does not develop them to be able to perform at a higher level.

The idea of self-organization has a kernel of validity: it is the idea that if a group of people are challenged to solve a problem, they will sometimes organize effectively to do that. That’s because they take ownership of the problem and rally around solving it. However, this is most effective when there is a severe sense of urgency. If not, it is very easy for a team to become dysfunctional, such as only a few doing most of the work, or the team splintering into two or more groups. What we want is the creative rally, but without the dysfunction. In other words, we want to thoughtfully empower and challenge people, on an ongoing basis, while continuing to monitor and teach, coach, and mentor.

That’s the right paradigm: empowerment and challenge, continuously. Saying that they will self-organize is going too far. It is too hands-off. Leaders need to watch, perhaps closely if the team is inexperienced. Leaders need to discern when to teach. For example, in his book Turn the Ship Around, sub captain David Marquet describes how he taught his crew to think out loud and share their reasons for their opinions, rather than only giving their opinions.

Leaders who have authority, such as sub captain David Marquet had, play a crucial role. Marquet did not just challenge people and stand back: he empowered people to figure out how to solve a problem, but he also asked questions, he taught, he discussed, he intervened, and often he made a final decision because he was accountable. He was a full spectrum leader, and that’s how he turned the Navy’s worst-performing sub into the best-performing one.

The same spectrum of leadership skills is needed in today’s business teams. As leadership professor and guru Gervase Bushe has said,

“Leading collaboratively requires treating followers as partners at the same time as the leader exercises authority.”

In other words, it is not about a leader abdicating authority, but rather about their behavior with respect to those they lead: specifically, treating their followers as partners, but also cultivating an inclusive environment that is safe for open discussion and learning. It’s also about generating those discussions, to make sure that issues are being identified, analyzed effectively, and addressed, applying the full creativity and energy of everyone involved. It’s about empowering, but also curating, discerning, and catalyzing. It’s not about using one’s authority for control: it’s about using it for growth and getting people to be their best.