Why don’t you build a team that will work autonomously and solve our main problems, while performing well above everyone else? And yeah, make them work with the rest of our company. Easy peasy.
First things first, Frederic Laloux made a study of how different organizations across the world are structured and published his discoveries in a book — Reinventing Organizations. He categorized them into five broad categories and labeled them by color. Roughly summarized, from autocracy, through master-servant, measured efficiency and business value, to mutual consensus models, culminating into the latest emerging one — autonomous self-organization, a.k.a. teal organization. If you haven’t heard about it, definitely give it a read. It provides a fresh perspective.
Now let’s think smaller. Scale down from thousands of people to a Scrum team. Imagine a group to whom you designate a responsibility, explain constraints, provide feedback, and measure its output and then… simply leave them alone. They will deliver what you need. Sounds like a fairy tale? It isn’t. People have the natural ability to self-organize to achieve what they need to achieve on their own. How do you think clans and tribes operated? If you set up the environment, explain the expected ways of working, give a little time and guidance, the team will form a self-contained organism that will optimize towards its prosperity. The prosperity translating into different things: money earned, amount of positive feedback, user satisfaction, good output metrics, solved problems, internal feeling of happiness… It does require a certain mindset, culture, and competence to raise a competent team, but good news is: Once established, most of it can be learned by newcomers. Another good news: You don’t need to get too involved. Just set the expectations, communicate clearly and consistently, tweak the prosperity factors. The team will do the rest.
Sounds good? In a small company, this is well achievable. After all, there’s only livelihood of a few people on the line. But how does it fit a larger organization? Having no control over the produced results is scary, however great they may be at the moment. Never mind that any control at any given time is an illusion for anything slightly complex. In my opinion, the best you can hope for is a perfect alignment and motivated people. Still, if you’re a manager, your job is to understand the reality as best and as fast you can and react to it quickly. You are responsible for the bigger picture. It’s hard to put your career in the hands of others, especially if you don’t understand how they work.
So how would a teal team fare in a larger company? It would likely succeed short-term, showing exceptional results. Then it would draw attention, scrutiny, and fear of not being able to maintain the high performance bar. The more I observe different companies from within, the more I become to realize: Teal teams would not survive unless left to their devices or unless having teal-aware leadership. Once their autonomy is compromised, they’re gone. Their ability to self-organize, to take ownership, to make independent decisions becomes damaged and they cannot function self-sufficiently anymore. Involvement from outside becomes necessary, which further increases the damage.
Autocratic and hierarchical structures would simply assert control for the power sake. There’s a strong desire to control the important decisions. Value and performance measurement approaches tend to get narrow-minded, focusing on things that can be easily measured and a simplified model of the output. Subtle, long-term value is easily lost when observing day-to-day, week-to-week indicators. A teal team could exist in such environment, but would likely get misaligned and would not prosper. On the other hand, using metrics as an informal indicator of the team’s health is not a bad idea. The dangers are micromanagement and short-sightedness. Democratic or consensus-based structures, in general, are ridden by decision paralysis. They also tend to force their values and operation model on all levels. This would interfere with a teal team’s ability to self-organize and make qualified, independent decisions by a single team member. Responsibility and ownership are often diluted if spread over a larger crowd.
All in all, I would only attempt to build a teal team if there’s understanding top-tier leadership, compatible culture, or as a separate business. Otherwise, it’s best to stick to the model, by which the company operates, and let the high-rung leadership play with company transformations. Autonomy is a luxury.
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