When Teams Create Themselves

What happens when you allow employees to form their own teams and run their own projects? The answer: Innovation.

- By Frank Theodore Koe

How do you foster an environment that sparks innovation? That’s the million-dollar question—and for a long time, the most common strategy has been for capable leaders to hire sharp minds and then assemble them into effective teams. But as it turns out, some of the greatest innovation happening today begins quite differently: Leaders hire sharp minds, but they do not assemble them into teams.

So who does? The team members themselves.

Teams arranged this way are called many different things: “empowered,” “self-directed,” or “autonomous.” Whatever they’re called, surveys have found that 79% of Fortune 1000 companies and 81% of manufacturing organizations currently deploy some version of this principle. The implementation may look different, but the general idea is the same: These companies encourage their employees to band together on their own and organize to explore new ideas, products, and services—and as a result, drive greater innovation, increase productivity, and improve employee satisfaction.

Some companies give employees total freedom to define their jobs; others make it a freewheeling portion of a more fixed role. Tesla, 3M, Google, and Zappos, for example, allow employees to proactively focus on their own ideas.

To see how it works, consider a rural Pennsylvania company called New Pig. The company’s workplace safety and spill containment products are used by more than 300,000 facilities worldwide, but its success doesn't begin with its products. It begins with the mission that attracts its employees.