Leadership

The Story of Teams Autonomy and Servant Leadership

You are with booking.com. What do you do there?

My current title is called Senior Developer and Team Lead. I look after two teams which belong to the business booking organization which is aimed toward business customers. Those who travel for business, those who organize travel for others, an enterprise solution on our platform. My day is mostly solving team problems and helping people to overcome the problems they might have. I take care of interactions within the team, interaction externally to other people outside the team. Being a team leader, a people manager.

What's the motivation for this talk?

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.