Practicing Self-Directed Work Culture

Decentralized teams are gaining more popularity across the globe by the day. Many businesses have chosen this type of work voluntarily, and the prevailing situation urges every team to explore similar possibilities. In decentralized teams, each individual takes own responsibility for his/her work and decision-making. In other words, a self-directed work culture that drives the team by realizing the strong points of each team member.

Before venturing into the idea of a self-directed team, let's take a look at its structure. According to some corporate researches, the size of a self-directed team should vary between two to 25 members and it must have flat hierarchies where every member has an opportunity to interact with other members. However, this does not mean that we are signaling to depreciate the role of managers altogether, but evolving it to better accommodate today's needs. Let's dive deep into the self-directed work culture and take a look at its various aspects.

How do self-directed teams work?

Traditional teams have managers that assign and direct the team towards a certain task. In self-directed teams, this is substituted by the company's mission and what it wants to accomplish for its customers. Each member should align their goals with those of the company to achieve a meaningful purpose. The goals of the company can be meeting deadlines, innovating new products, boosting sales, productivity, and customer base.

To accomplish this, everyone on the team must follow a set of rules. Ongoing testing and previous experiences can be very crucial in helping the teams make these rules. The members may collectively decide what works for everyone and what does not. To steer the team successfully towards the goal, it can also adopt a charter.

In essence, the driving force in a self-directed team is the company's business outcome rather than focusing on governance. But, how do self-directed teams go about governance? The driving force here is the consensus of the team members for small or large tasks. The team works as an entity and takes care of scheduling and managing workflows.

When it comes to creating such a team, aspects such as finding the strong and weak points, the aspiration and goals of each team member is important. Additionally, In such a structure, the team members have to align and assess progress on a regular basis to follow the desired path, much more frequently than in a traditional team.

Advantages of self-directed teams

Let's just cut to the chase and get to the major positive points of a self-directed team:

• The members of such teams are empowered to take corrective action form day-to-day problems. In such a case the team member doesn't have to wait for lengthy approval times.
• It increases the flexibility of the team many folds.
• It brings down the delivery time by a decent measure since one does not have to wait for approvals.
• It lets the team adapt fast to technological change as well as to market sentiments.
• Increases employee morale, commitment, and trust in the organization.
• A peer-to-peer review system helps the members improve their work.
• More freedom of ownership of work.

Monitoring a Self-Directed Team

Although the idea of self-directed work culture is to foster values like self-correction, self-review, and self-implementation, there are always areas where the leadership can guide the team. When it comes to key performance indices, the business outcome is where the major chunk of the monitoring task lies. Aligning the outcome with the individual responsibilities of members can help gauge the performance of the team. However, this is not the only way to do it. Business leaders can also create individuals KPIs and methodologies to monitor output and performance. However, a self-directed team will always be interdependent when it comes to assessing the progress.

Some Pitfalls

Like every other approach, this one also has some downsides, which can emerge partly because of the lack of research or implementation. For starters, before a team moves towards a more self-directed operation a smooth transition period is necessary. The role of this transition period will be to onboard everyone on the team to this idea. Business leaders or team leaders must identify differing qualities and capabilities of the members and set the governing rules carefully. This shall be done with the team members. The set of rules that the team follows should be delivered with finesse. Apart from these, here are some pitfalls:

• Reskilling of employees can be expensive and the team can experience early inefficiency.
• The transition period can become quite long if everyone on the team is not on the same page.
• Hiring new talent to fill skill gaps can be a tedious process.
• There’s always a possibility of the team showcasing reckless behavior because of the independence.

If the team members can successfully navigate through the pitfalls then self-directed work culture can be a game-changer, especially for a highly dispersed team. The bottom line is that this work culture can help teams cope with the changing dynamics around the world. It also gives the team members an ability to innovate and implement on their own, making the organization more agile if the execution is spot on. Cheers.

October 3, 2020