In a study on self-managing teams, it was found:
“Members of teams that are genuinely managing themselves show three basic characteristics in the way they approach their work:
- They take personal responsibility for the outcomes of their team’s work.
- They monitor their own work performance, actively seeking data about how well they are performing.
- They alter their performance strategies as needed, creating suitable solutions to work problems.”
Virtual teams will benefit from having the capacity to manage themselves, but this approach is not always successful. Is that a result of poor management, poor coaching or something else? The leadership and coaching needed to accomplish a level of excellence was found not as important as the composition of the team and providing them adequate support:
“Do leaders matter? The findings of this study might be taken to imply that leaders don’t matter much. A better interpretation is that our emphasis on a leader’s day to day coaching is misplaced. After all, setting up a team right in the first place and ensuring that it has the needed resources are critical leadership functions.”
Passages taken from: Critical Success Factors for Creating Superb Self-Managing Teams
by Ruth Wageman
