Last night I attended an interesting presentation and discussion of how to create empowered, effective, and fun teams as part of a local Agile Meetup. I try to attend these types of meetups every so often with the goal of keeping my skills fresh and with the hope of learning something new. While I always learn something new from these discussions and networking, more often than not, it is always a variation on a theme. When I heard that the topic of this discussion was focused on team building, I knew that I wanted to attend because, as an Organizational Development specialist and Change Agent, bringing together a group of individuals and transforming them into a team that is singularly focused on achieving results and meeting specific goals and objectives is something that I am passionate about and I am always looking for ways to build better teams.
Over the years, I have studied texts, read white-papers, and attended numerous presentations on building effective teams. All had one thing in common: the role of management in building and assembling the team. Last night’s presentation was focused on the role of the individuals that would be forming the teams and how they could be trusted to form their own teams leveraging a concept called “Self-selection” turning the traditional formation of teams, managerial selection, on its head.
The concept of self-selection is described by Sandy Mamoli and David Mole in their book, Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel, as a facilitated process of letting people decide which team they will work on and trusting that each individual will keep the best interests of their company at the fore. The basis for this concept is that people are happier and more effective when they choose their work and who they want to work with. Makes sense, right?
This concept is literally a 180° departure from managerial selection and can be a hard sell to “traditional” organizations that are still struggling with the wave of change brought about by the gradual departure from traditional project management methodologies and the adoption of Agile processes that enable organizations to embrace change and feedback into their development processes. Leading edge organizations that have embraced the digital age and understand that competitive advantage can only be achieved by putting their products in front of customers early and often are the ones that will be more than willing to trust their employees to form their own teams and organize in a way that places goals of their company first.
How does self-selection work? The picture below describes the Self-Selection Process. Embracing Agile concepts, the process of Self-Selection is an iterative process that is facilitated by someone familiar with the process, but ultimately led by the team members. Product owners basically present their projects to the group (make their case as to why their project/product is the coolest place to be) and then stand back while the individual team members search for their team. After round 1, each team evaluates if they can meet the goals and objectives of their mission based on the number of members they have and the combination of skills and experience of the combined team. This goes on until the teams are satisfied that they have the people needed to get the work done. Sort of a variation on Tuckman’s stages of group development that takes place in a condensed time frame (usually 2-3 hours at most).
The benefits of self-selecting teams are just starting to be discovered. You can expect to find that teams that self-select are:
- Happier (they are working with people that they want to work with and on projects/products that they want to work on)
- More productive (they have a passion for what they are working on and want to support their team)
- More confident (they have achieved the ultimate “buy-in” by being given the authority to choose their own work)
This is just a quick synopsis of what I learned from one presentation on self-selecting teams given by Amber King and Jesse Huth who have implemented this concept at OPower, a leading edge digital utility company based in Arlington and freshly acquired by Oracle and by reading the blog of the authors of Creating Great Teams. I look forward to learning more about this concept and helping spread the word about the power of self-selected teams.
This post was originally published on LinkedIn by the author.