Letting people choose their own teams? It sounds radical – maybe even chaotic. As an engineering leader, you might worry that self-selection will end up with unbalanced teams, or missing critical skills. Your fears are not uncommon… just unwarranted!
But here’s the thing: your current approach to team formation probably isn’t delivering all the customer value you need.
That spreadsheet where you’re trying to optimize team assignments? The one with all the colored cells showing dependencies, hand-offs, and partial allocations? Who won’t play well with whom?
Each cell represents a delay in delivering value to your customers.
So.. if you haven’t tried it, I’m encouraging you to be brave: give self-selection a try.
Why Consider Self-Selection?
A recent conversation with Sandy Mamoli and David Mole, authors of the recently updated book Creating Great Teams, How Self-Selection Lets People Excel, highlighted that 10 years of evidence supporting self-selection is compelling. Organizations from traditional banks to cutting-edge startups have discovered that when people choose their teams:
- Delivery flow improves as hand-offs and dependencies decrease
- Innovation improves as cross-functional teams form and evolve naturally
- Customer focus sharpens when teams own complete value streams
- Learning accelerates as people select into areas they want to master
- Products improve when teams have full context and ownership
The range of scale and timeframes is astounding: from 500 people at three locations over months … to small teams self-selecting on demand.
A Little Life Advice from Sandy
Yet despite the evidence, hesitation seems to persist. (I can hear you shaking your head from here…).
When I asked Sandy how she addresses reluctance, her response struck me as wisdom that extends far beyond team formation: “I think it’s really human that if there is something we don’t know, there’s high uncertainty, there’s a big unknown, we worry. When we worry about something big and unknown, we don’t know what to worry about, so the brain makes up concerns. And we always end up worrying about the wrong things. So everything people ever worry about, it doesn’t happen. It’s totally different things that happen. So in those cases… you might as well do it and deal with the actual problems that happen, rather than the worries that never eventuate.”
Some Common Worries and Likely Actual Outcomes:
“What if we can’t cover all our product areas?”
- Self-selected teams often identify overlooked customer needs and reorganize to address them more effectively.
“What if critical features get ignored?”
- When teams choose their work, they make better trade-offs between customer needs and technical requirements.
“What about product knowledge and continuity?”
- Self-selection often improves knowledge sharing as people naturally gravitate toward areas where they can both contribute and learn.
The Real Risk
The biggest risk isn’t that self-selection might fail. It’s continuing with a system where product delivery is slowed by team boundaries that have been artificially created. That current structure might be “optimized for resource allocation,” but is it optimized for autonomy, mastery, purpose, creativity, and interpersonal relationships…. all precursors for the delivery of customer value?
Start Small, Learn Fast
The first time, or the Nth time you do a self-selection event, things won’t be perfect. (But if you as the manager make the team selections, you will get it wrong too.)
Start small and learn quickly. You don’t need to reorganize your entire product organization at once (but that’s always a possibility!)
1. Pick a single, clear customer value stream, for example:
- A specific user journey that needs improvement
- A product feature that crosses current team boundaries
- A customer pain point requiring multiple skill sets
2. Create clear guardrails:
- The team owns its value stream end-to-end
- The team size is 3-7 people, to maintain focus without a high collaboration cost
- People commit fully to one team, and one team only, to eliminate context-switching
3. Make the experiment outcome-focused:
- Define clear success metrics, preferably a leading indicator (eg the “Happiness, Innovation, and Productivity (H.I.P.) Survey” listed in my Employee Engagement post, )
- Provide “air cover” to allow the team experiment to run for 3-6 months, with a cadence of regular check-ins/retrospectives.
- Measure impact on things like delivery and customer satisfaction (lagging indicators)
If the experiment doesn’t work out, you can always return things to the way they were. “A two-way door” as David called it.
Ready to Transform Your Teams?
Start with one value stream, trust your people to organize around it effectively, and watch what emerges. You might be surprised at how quickly delivery accelerates when people choose their teams and teams choose their work.
Need support on your journey?
- Grab Sandy and David’s newly updated book Creating Great Teams, How Self-Selection Lets People Excel
- Explore real case studies and quick-start guides on the Nomad8 website.
Remember: Like any good experiment, self-selection is a two-way door. The only real risk is maintaining the status quo while your competition learns to move faster.
Additional Resources for Deeper Learning
Books
- Teaming: How Organizations Learn, Innovate and Compete in the Knowledge Economy by Amy Edmonson
- Project to Product by Mik Kersten
- Dynamic Reteaming by Heidi Helfand
- Leadership Series by David Marquet
Blogs
Podcasts
- Beyond Agile Theatre w Gene Gendel
- Rediscovering Natural Human Organization w Simon Holzapfel
- Bad Sh!t Managers Do: Moving From Management to Leadership with Dr. Steve Martin
Fully support this Andy and in reality, difficult to try without the right leadership influence, often unwilling.
Still, in the rare cases I have been involved, the outcomes are indeed impressive!
Pete OliverKrueger and I plan to deep deeper into this in our second “Shift” book!