How to lead a self-managing team

This work discusses the teams that are basically left to run themselves can be highly efficient and productive. To be successful, though, such autonomous groups require a specific type of external leadership. To get work done, many companies organize employees into self-managing teams that are basically left to run themselves with some guidance from an external leader. In fact, comprehensive surveys report that 79% of companies in the fortune 1000 and 81% of manufacturing organizations currently deploy such "empowered", "self-directed" or "autonomous" teams. Because of their widespread use, much research has been devoted to understanding how best to set up self-managing teams to maximize their productivity and effectiveness. Interestingly, though, relatively little attention has been paid to the leaders who must oversee such working groups. [This publication contains reprint articles for which IEEE does not hold copyright. Full text is not available on IEEE Xplore for these articles.]