Presentation: The Story of Teams Autonomy and Servant Leadership

This talk is based on my experience at booking.com. I've been with them three and a half years, and during this time I saw how the team organization transformed from a team where a team leader made all the decisions and facilitated all the meetings, and was the person responsible for the team performance. Then I witnessed and was part of the autonomous team where there was no team leader and people within the team were equally responsible for driving the team performance and making it happen. In the end, we have reached the third leadership concept, a combination of two worlds, having a team lead but also using the team autonomy.

This person is responsible for making sure that autonomy is respected, and can step in to fix that. I found this valuable experience, I found how to be efficient as organization, how to transform its internal way of management, way of organizing teams. We've had really interesting learning from there, some failures. I'm going to talk about this experience. I hope this might help other companies to know these things in advance, see what's possible. I think autonomous teams are a quite uncommon way of managing people and managing teams, and these learnings might inspire other people to try to do something within their organization if something is not going well.

Autonomous means that everybody in the team is equally responsible for team performance, and that makes people really care about the product they're building. When there is no team lead you can rely on, you start taking more and more actions in order to fix things or in order to drive them in the right direction. I will share in my talk some real life examples about how things were solved in an autonomous way. For example, how do we manage performance reviews of each other. If there is no direct manager, we have to come up with a way to give score points to everybody. We are sitting together in a room and discussing each other. It was scaring in the beginning because now I have to discard and now I have to assess performance of my of my peers who I work with, and it was a bit of like, hey, will it go well? What happens after we evaluate people? Will that offend someone or how the relationship will go afterward? In my team it proved to work very well, and people really could get the feedback, and since it was not given by a person but by a group of people, the feedback was much more diverse and it was much more objective comparing to one person.