The Corporate Bystander

With growing self-organization, be wary of the corporate bystanders.

In modern organizations, there is a growing tendency to strive for more autonomy and self-organization, for both teams and for individuals inside teams. This comes at a price. If you’re not careful, corporate bystanding lurks around the corner.

Teams should be able to determine what work they can handle and how they accomplish that. The ideas behind the growing autonomy are both the advantages of the motivation for employees as well as the high level of expertise that lives inside the teams — much of today’s work has become so technically complicated that managers no longer have the knowledge nor the skills to determine what other people can or cannot do, how they do it, and how much effort that will take.

Also, in modern organizations, there is no longer a strict hierarchy present inside teams. Take, for instance, a modern Agile framework like Scrum, in which there are only three roles in a team — Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team Member. There is no “Project Manager”, “Team Lead”, “Senior Developer”, “Team Architect”, “Test Lead”, et cetera. All team members are considered to be equal and are equally held responsible for the end result which is achieved by the team.