Organizations talk about empowerment, collaboration, and innovation. They say they want teams to take initiative, solve customer problems, and deliver meaningful outcomes.
But there is often a big gap between what we say and what we do.
Teams are completing tasks but not feeling much purpose or impact. Decisions get escalated (and delayed) that shouldn’t need approval. “Collaboration” feels like coordinating handoffs rather than creating product value together. People hesitate to speak up or take action because it feels safer to wait for direction.
Leaders feel the tension. Teams feel the pressure. And despite everyone’s effort and good intentions, progress is slower than it should be. In the first article of this series, I wrote about the three competencies adaptive organizations must grow to create clarity and alignment: Business Agility, Self-Managing Teams, and Integrated Leadership.
This article focuses on the Self-Managing Teams competency. Because without the ability to work together with trust, transparency, and ownership, even the best strategies will fail.
Self-managing teams are how strategy comes to life. They’re also how organizations know when strategy needs to shift.
But most teams aren’t set up for effective self-management and co-creation. They’re set up to comply.
The root cause isn’t that people are not working hard enough or are not smart enough.
It’s that we don’t set teams up for success. They are not supported in growing a strong team, continuously improving their ways of working, and solving problems collaboratively.
Building Blocks of Self-Managing Teams
Self-managing teams aren’t teams without leaders or structure. They are teams that are supported by leaders and structure to do the following:
- Bring strategy to life through shared understanding and intentional action
- Surface when strategy needs to shift based on what they’re learning
- Work as a collective, not a group of individuals performing tasks
Here are the three building blocks that make this possible:
1. Grow a strong team identity
Team identity is the foundation of everything — trust, shared purpose, and mutual accountability.
Teams with a strong identity:
- Know why they exist and feel connected to a bigger purpose
- Have clear working agreements and expectations
- Engage in conflict creatively and productively
- Are committed to each other and hold each other accountable
- Build a foundation of trust through transparency, integrity, and reliability
A strong team identity gives people something to belong to and something to steward. Without it, work relationships become transactional, and learning and improvement are stifled.
2. Own their process and outcomes through continuous improvement
Self-managing teams don’t wait for someone else to fix problems or decide how work should happen. They take responsibility for both the outcomes they create and their ways of working.
This looks like:
- Reflecting regularly on how they work and their results with openness and honesty
- Connecting improvements to customer and stakeholder outcomes
- Making commitments to each other, not just completing tasks
- Deciding how best to do the work, adjusting their processes and tools
- Succeeding as a team and failing as a team — no blame game, no “well, I got my task done”
The people who do the work are the ones who best know how to do it. When teams are empowered and incentivized to work together, they will find better ways to improve value delivery and reduce forms of waste.
3. Collaborative problem-solving to unlock innovation
Innovation is possible when teams can openly explore problems, share diverse perspectives, and experiment their way towards enabling customer outcomes.
Collaborative problem-solving means:
- Issues are surfaced early and often
- Challenges and opportunities are explored together
- People feel safe challenging assumptions and seeking out diverse perspectives
- Taking smart risks to test creative ideas and discover new solutions
- Failure is leveraged for learning
This capability allows teams to discover innovative solutions and adapt quickly to new information. And this also helps the organization learn when strategy might need to change.
What Keeps Organizations Stuck
I often hear leaders in organizations say they want their teams to feel empowered. However, just saying it isn’t usually enough because of three common patterns that undermine self-managing teams.
Escalation Culture
When there are many competing priorities, pressure from stakeholders to “do it all”, and teams don’t feel safe making decisions, a culture of escalation develops. Even if a team does make a decision about what to focus on this week, stakeholders can go around them and try to get it reversed.
Eventually, teams are trained to wait for direction, to just follow orders. Instead of innovation, you get “just tell me what to do.”
Silos and Handoffs
Work has to move from person to person or team to team in order to deliver a valuable outcome. Often, this can take weeks or even months from the time work is started to when customers actually get value. In this system, there is no real transparency to progress nor accountability for outcomes.
Working in silos means people become task-oriented rather than outcome-oriented. The result is lots of waste, stalled progress, and playing the blame-game when it leads to poor results.
Lack of Psychological Safety
When people don’t feel safe to raise issues, question assumptions, or take any risks, self-management is impossible. Teams avoid experimentation because they fear consequences more than they value learning.
Without psychological safety, no framework or practice will make a team self-managing.
What It Takes to Build Self-Management
Growing this competency isn’t just about giving teams more freedom and ownership. It’s about giving them clarity, structure, and support, so they can step into ownership confidently.
Practices That Help
- Clear boundaries for autonomy and decision-making
- Working agreements that support trust and accountability
- Role clarity that promotes collaboration rather than protecting silos
Facilitation and Coaching That Support Growth
- Team coaching that builds psychological safety
- Facilitation that helps teams see patterns in how they work and design experiments for improving effectiveness
- Teaching teams how to engage in productive conflict, generating ideas and exploring diverse perspectives
Leadership Behaviors That Enable Self-Management
Leaders play a crucial role. They shift from directing to enabling, from being the expert to facilitating collective intelligence.
This looks like:
- Staying open and curious rather than pushing for certainty and guarantees
- Creating space for teams to think and learn, not just pushing for results
- Shifting from a focus on productivity metrics to a focus on value metrics
Frameworks and tools can provide structure and clarity, but they are only as effective as the people using them. Training, facilitation, and coaching are necessary to help people, teams, and organizations break out of ingrained habits and patterns to build the capacity for self-management. And creating a culture of learning and adaptive leadership is what sustains it.
Conclusion
Most teams want to take initiative. They want to collaborate well, make good decisions, and feel like their work matters. Leaders also want this for their teams. But desire alone isn’t enough.
Teams become self-managing when they are supported in growing a strong team identity, improving how they work together, and solving problems collaboratively. These are not “nice to have” behaviors — they are the conditions that allow strategy to come to life.
Self-management isn’t about pushing decisions down. It’s about creating clarity, trust, and shared purpose so teams can take ownership with confidence.
When organizations invest in these capabilities, the shift is tangible. Collaboration becomes easier. Decision-making becomes clearer. Resilience grows. Teams feel trusted and responsible, and they act like it.
This is how you shift from compliance to collaboration. And it’s how organizations unlock innovation, create alignment, and grow a culture of continuous improvement
If you want to explore how to grow self-managing teams in your organization, reach out for a conversation. Let’s talk about how to empower and enable your teams.