Not the OP, but generally self organizing generally leads to the person with the most status / soft skills doing the organizing. (Kinda fun when you are that person)

It works pretty well when there is a clear task and alignment on why it needs to get done. Unfortunately you still need someone to set expectations and resolve conflicts.

I’ve been that person before. It was good while it lasted, but some organizational changes put the wrong people in change and moved me out of that role in favor of more authoritarian rule. I don’t think I need to go into all the details, suffice to say, it left me burnt out and not too excited to volunteer for things.

I’m in a place where the team needs to self-organize again, but I’m less willing to step up, and no one else is either. Some members of the team have also been vocal with the “X is not my boss, why are they talking” line when someone tries to control the chaos. We have 2 people whose literal job is organize and run the team (a boss and a scrum master), but they either aren’t around or aren’t competent. This has left the team in a pretty bad spot. Every team needs at least one person to step up, and that person needs to be reasonably competent. Hopefully Bayer has this, as playing fast and loose with medication is a bad idea. I want the companies producing my medication to have strong and robust processes in place.

Yea, as someone who is more outspoken and has passible soft skills, I often find myself accidentally becoming team leads in ways that often end up making me a worse engineer. If I'm the only person who understands the work and can express it in legible english, I end up writing all the tickets because the Project Manager can't do it as well as me. I end up leading meetings because I understand the architecture reasonably well and can put it into words. And yet, I end up looking bad on paper because I complete very little technical work because I'm doing half of the job of 3 managers.

Don't play the hero. Unless you want to get rewarded with even more work. Do the job you are assigned to or ask for a raise.

Sure, I'm aware of it, but having your team abjectly fail isn't good for your continued job prospects either. You shouldn't be the hero, but you also don't want to have your team get fired for want of you spending 2 hours of work a week keeping it on track.

I just want to urge you to be very careful with that. A job is - most often just a job. If you are too personally invested, you may need to take a step back and see if everyone around you is as invested.

I am not saying this from the perspective of someone who is slacking off at their job but from the perspective of someone who did too many heroics and only nearly avoided burn out. If your team gets fired because of one persons work/efforts or the lack thereof then something is seriously wrong AND there is a risky bus factor of 1. Please take my advice, the grass is always greener on the other side.

A self organizing department within a sea of non-self organizing departments sounds terrible. Thankfully this is being implemented company wide.

I personally say no to my boss 70% of the time, and do things my own way. Usually my n+2 likes the results I deliver, so I am reasonably covered by him, politically.

[that will probably not last long, anyway]

What problems did you encounter?

Short summary: biggest asshole gets his way.

So just like a non-self-organizing department then?

or "best friends with the big boss" gets his way, this is an organization problem and the start of the slippery slide for a good company to become a bad company and is the point where most CEO's fail to do their duty.

Yeah, I saw the "self organizing" bit, and I thought "good f'ing luck". E.g. I don't see many folks touting Zappos' notorious "holacracy" structure these days.

Reducing unnecessary levels of middle management, particularly in a bloated company, is usually a great idea. But I've found that the vast majority of people are not interested in "self organizing". They just want to come to work, feel that they are supported doing great work, and have a strong sense that the work they are doing matters to the company.

That's why as a former manager I felt like my most important job was to "block" for my team. I.e. there is always a bit of chaos and change at the upper levels reflecting to change in the business and competitive landscape, but as much as possible I tried to protect my team from this unnecessary churn. I've often said "coders are happiest when they're coding", so I tried to have product plans and priorities laid out as much as possible so folks could come in and do great work.

This doesn't mean "hiding" the broader corporate machinations from folks, but most people just don't want to be affected by that day-to-day. I've never seen this "self organizing" approach work, and Ive seen lots of cases where it was deemed an abject failure.