How To Create A Self Managing Team

I’m talking today about leaders of groups of individuals, groups of human beings.

If you lead human beings this is for you!

I reckon there are two types of people who lead human beings, there are those in a reactive mode: running around, always busy, there are always things happening that throw them off course. The impact of being thrown off course is that you’re not serving clients and providing value to your clients which is in the end the thing that brings money in the door.

There is another way of doing it.

The other way of doing it is to have a self managing team. One where things are done proactively so that you have put things in place so that your team are firing and doing what they need to do.

If you want to know how to create a self managing team, stick around I’m going to talk it through.

We’re talking about this concept of the selfing managing team, if you’ve got a self managing team it’s easy, there’s more space, you get more freedom and you don’t get impacted by all these reactive things that go on when your team have troubles and you’re trying to serve the clients and do the things that give value.

There are three components, the first component is the most critical… The first component is all about the way you think. Mindset. If you want to have a self managing team you cannot have the mindset of either of these two things: one – that you need to be part of every single thing your team does. You need to create enough distance with your team – a bizarre concept – that you trust them to get on with the job. If you have the mindset that you need to be involved in everything they do it’s just not going to work. The second mindset that you need to have is : you need to care! You need to trust but you need to actually care about humans.

The second part of this is systems, and this is where I talk all the time to leaders about the different systems they’ve got in place but there are two kinds of systems. There are human systems, which is what we’re talking about with self managing teams, but there are also tech systems and processes. What we’re talking about here is the human systems. As much as possible you want the tech and the business processes to be automated and seamless enough that they help the humans. If they don’t help the humans what’s the point of having them in place?

Your job is to make these work, make these systems (tech etc) sing for these people (the humans).

There are some specific systems that I install to help the humans be at their best.

The first one is – you’ve got to give them a performance recipe, you’ve got to be clear every quarter about what the priorities are, what success looks like, and what performance looks like. (I have a specific tool to use to do that, I will talk about it in another blog post).

The second one is – you’ve got to give them regular feedback and coaching, and that in itself is a system because it’s a leadership system that says “You know what? Performance looks like this, and today, that didn’t look like performance, so what are we going to do to improve that” or “How can I help you get to that performance level?”

So we need to have the mindset where we trust our people to do what we pay them to do and we need to care enough about them that we’re willing to invest in them and demonstrate that to them. Then once we’ve got that in place we need to install quarterly and monthly systems that show them what performance is and help them get there.

They’re the first two components. Then the third component is: if you’re dealing with human systems, if you’re dealing with humans – they’ve got families, they’ve got lives, they’ve got aspirations, they’ve got emotions. They aren’t the tech and the computer processes.

There’s one last thing you need to install which is inspiration. If humans don’t have inspiration, if they don’t have a picture of the future it’s hard for them to get out of bed every day… it’s hard for most of us to get out of bed every day… but if we’ve got a reason to get out of bed every day we can find a reason to give you that performance that you’re after and we can be self managing rather than rely on you for everything.

What I talk about a lot here is – you are a “meaning-maker” for your staff. You give them meaning every single day around why they come to work and what they do and what the future is, and if you’re going to paint a view of anything, what will get people out of bed everyday is a view of the future that’s meaningful.

To revise: If you want a self managing team, one that isn’t coming to you all the time, isn’t making you reactive (which means you can’t serve clients), if you want one that’s easy and simple and gives you freedom, install three things.
Firstly: You’ve got to have a mindset where you care and trust your people.
Secondly: You’ve got to have systems in place but recognise that human systems have different needs. One of the things they need is…
Thirdly: That sense of inspiration – think of yourself as a meaning-maker – you’ve got to paint a vision of the future that helps them do their best work.

So if you want more performance, if you want a self managing team, if you want more freedom and space and less chaos, you might want to go about putting these processes into place, the mindset, the systems and the inspiration for the humans that work in your business.

The way I work with businesses to put this in place is usually working with groups of leaders over a period of 12 months or more in some cases, where we teach them how to do this for themselves.

If you want to see some case studies, go to the front of my website, there’s a button for “case studies”, click on that and you can see there some examples of people that I’ve done this for and how it worked for them. If you look at those case studies and think… “You know what, this might be someone that I could work with to implement a self managing team for myself.” The next step is just to click on the button down below and we can have a chat.

It’s been awesome talking to you about self managing teams, talk to you soon.