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Are Self-managed Teams possible? - read the full article about 2021 HR trends, Human Resources and Recruitment, Staffing, Payroll from Tom Haak on Qualified.One
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what does the term self-managed team really mean autonomous teams or self-organizing teams seems to be a hot topic in business at this moment but is a self-managed team just a pipe dream or actually possible in reality lets find out welcome to talking hr trends with natal and tom im natal denk and im tom hack and we explore the latest hot topics and business challenges impacting the people side of organizations stick around to the end for our practical top tip and if you find this discussion valuable please subscribe [Music] okay tom lets start with the definition what does self-managed team mean i would say its its a team that takes responsibility to deliver a product or a service together in a collaborative way without a manager managing that so its a team that delivers something they do it collaborative without a manager and i think taking responsibility to deliver something together is a important kind of characteristic um so its often associated with an autonomous product team i find in an organization um and i think that having that aligned purpose is very important because it gives the structure that then allows that autonomy okay so its a very nice concept uh and i hear a lot of organizations talking about it at the moment but is it actually possible whats your thoughts no i think its definitely possible thats one but not everywhere so its its its a concept you can you cant say well its the concept every organization should implement in the future that i dont think that works there theres a good and always the example uh the dutch example of beard sora comes up ive im sure im sure you have heard it numerous times and thats an organization that delivers uh uh help care home care people yeah yeah and and and so beards are they they have uh uh yeah self-managed teams in a sense you could say its relatively easy in that context because its what they have to do together is mainly planning who is going where and after youve done the planning the work is not together thats mostly soloists work but theyre doing that very well yeah theres an example of an other organization in the netherlands i said okay they are doing it we are going to replicate it and it didnt work yeah why for example i think the main reason was that their population was a totally different there were people generally a little bit older people who had been working and managed teams for years and years and they could not make the shift so yeah its not for everyone yeah secondly i think its very important its not easy so it can work but it comes with a lot of rules and regulations in a way yeah there are numerous concepts or various concepts around self managed concepts that are commercial concepts like all accuracy like the spotify model and there are others if you adapt such a model then you have to go theres a whole handbook you have to follow its not okay we are self-managed teams whoa you know we we can do what we want and its like oh thats that does not work so it it works if you make conscious choice and then learn how to do it yeah and yeah and well you have more experience than that but so it can work not everywhere and if you make the choice well it takes a lot of effort to really make it work yeah definitely um sociocracy is another really good one for people to check out um no exactly and actually what i find interesting about the concept of autonomous teams self-organizing teams uh self-managed teams which all seems to be very interchangeable uh descriptions uh is the need the the bigger need for structure and discipline so the autonomy comes from the idea that its very clear what youre accountable for what the responsibilities are of the team versus other parts of the organization or other roles i also find that any successful organization that has enabled autonomous teams they have roles such as coaches or scrum masters or even product owners or project managers where they are these sort of roles that also create this extra layer of accountability so the team need to collaborate together and make decisions but they also have this objective voice that comes in to sort of gets them to reflect on how theyre working or gets them to think about what impediments are getting in their way and actually helping them remove those impediments throughout the organization and then a role such as a product owner is coming in with that commercial vision okay this is what we need to deliver for the actual end customer you might be getting wrapped up in the actual way of delivering that in the team but this is where were trying to get to so i do think theres a need to create sort of accountability of roles across the organization to help the teams be successful um thats what ive found also with the dutch example you used i know they were very cl they had their own essentially profit you know piano sheet theyve got their either they have their own region they look after that region um theres this real sense of ownership of what theyre delivering against which i think is really important so whats the role of hr in this because weve talked in the past that hr should be more focused on teams not just individuals in how they build solutions in an organization but also in our role as a as a coach and a consultant so how do you see hr helping self-managed teams in an organization yeah and i see two elements one you can talk about hr or you can talk about hrs roles what you often see is that that you have less hr as an hr function but roles that have to be taken and then i see a couple of roles where you could say form or hr can play a role ive seen self-managed teams where where they they have two type of one is the the the the process coach often those are not hr people to be honest they more come from id or scrum masters they say how do we do are we following the rules is the process the right product but hr can learn that as well of course the other is around the personal coaching helping people to become better thats a role where hr can play an important role that doesnt necessarily need to be a role in the organization you can also say we hire other people to do that so thats a mixture but often where in the in the traditional organization the manager more takes that role hey not all how are you doing someone has to do that theres a role for that and hr can do that another important role is the staffing element how do we yeah make sure there are people in the teams and its also the movement between the teams there are people who are in the right team there are people who are in two teams so the staffing element is also an important role where hr can can do things yeah definitely and actually having a working agreement about who is responsible for those kind of things so i have seen some autonomous teams take the responsibility to recruit and hire for their own team where others they defer that to say a hr role so again um you go through sort of what were the roles and responsibilities that a manager played for a team now does the team take some of those on or does a role such as hr take some of those on and thats i think how you can be very clear as to what you do and what you dont do in the team thanks for that tom lets now look at the practical top tip for today as a hr professional think about your role in helping self-managed teams they actually need a lot of support to get started and to stay in action so look at it as a type of coach and facilitator and consider a toolkit to be ready to guide a self-managed team so in that toolkit i would suggest that having things like okrs working agreements the use of visualization tools like kanban or a scrum board and also know how to help them with rituals so regular rituals such as the retrospective so they actually inspect and adapt their ways of working and continuously look at how theyre collaborating just as much as the tools theyre using to get the job done if you see yourself more as the coach and facilitator in this environment you can really help a self-managed team get going thank you for joining us today this is talking hr trends with natal and tom if you found this discussion valuable please subscribe have a great day
Tom Haak: Are Self-managed Teams possible? - Human Resources