When I first started leading teams, I thought being a good manager meant being everywhere. I felt like checking every ticket, joining every status update and so on. I got exhausted because you can only do so much. My team was frustrated too, as if I was watching them over all the time. I was doing something wrong. It took a few painful lessons to realize that I had to let it go. That's when I came up with subteam tenets. Over the years, I updated and improved it but these gave me basis for self managing teams.
These guiding principles creates a workspace where everyone can manage themselves and work independently. It allowed me to adopt a 'fire and forget' methodology in my leadership approach. When I delegate a project or task, my aim is to set it in motion and then step back, trusting in my team's capability to handle it without further intervention from my end. And forgetting doesn't mean you don't support them down the road. One of my direct reports asked about that. It means I know it'll be done well.
When you get into managing details, it doesn’t scale. Talented engineers or managers just need direction. Steve Jobs puts it really well.
The greatest people are self-managing. They don’t need to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to do it… What they need is a common vision, and that’s what leadership is.
Steve Jobs
Leading Self Managing Teams
Articulating a Vision and Mission
In leading teams, I often see how vision and mission guides us in who we bring on board and how we evolve. Those are the kind of things you want to spend some time on. You want to come up with a compelling vision, hire with mission in your mind and revise it as you evolve.
A Compelling Vision
The first thing people ask about a team or organization is what it accomplishes, and a clear vision answers that before anyone has to ask. The key isn’t to have a fancy mission statement, but to make sure the mission comes up when you're going through everyday decisions. Bring it up in one-on-ones, retros, and even during casual chats. When your people start echoing the vision back to you, that feels nice. You're doing it.
Hire with the Mission in Mind
In assembling a team, my focus is on finding individuals who bring not just the essential skills, but also a natural fit with the team's dynamics. What does it mean though? It means you make up a team based on key characteristics. Be it skill. Be it mindset. A good mix always gives diversity of capability. Once you get that right, stating the mission plainly does the filtering for you. You see fast who leans into it and who is just nodding along.
My best hires always had good attitude. This is why we sometimes passed on technically brilliant candidates who didn’t share our sense of ownership or curiosity. Skills can be taught, but shared purpose cannot. As the years go by, I find myself caring even more about attitude. People that I can depend on.
Revising Vision and Mission
Neither vision nor mission is written in stone. Both need revisiting on a regular cadence so everyone stays aligned on where things are actually headed. Revisiting the vision shouldn’t be seen as instability; it’s adaptation. I suggest hosting open mission review sessions twice a year, inviting engineers, designers, and even interns to critique our direction. It’s humbling but enlightening. You find yourself in a better place. At the very least, people feel they contribute back to mission.
Self Sufficient Subteams
Over time, I’ve learned that the best thing I can do as a leader is step back and let smaller teams take the lead. That’s when they really thrive. How do they become self sufficient? Well, by trying it out.
The hardest part as a leader is resisting the urge to step in. Been there, done that. You want people to succeed. But you need to give people room to stumble. Real learning happens when they recover without you. Watching someone make a mistake you could’ve prevented is painful. But if you jump in every time, they’ll never learn. If you clear every obstacle yourself, you become the only person on the team who knows how to clear obstacles.
Autonomous Subteams
I am a huge fan of smaller teams that get things done with little communication overhead. Dividing the teams into smaller, self sufficient subteams has proven to be effective at every organization I've been. These groups own their projects end to end, which means accountability has a name attached to it instead of dissolving into the wider team.
A subteam should be 2-5 people, no more. This gives focus but at the same time drastically decreases the communication overhead. Imagine you need to update 2 people as opposed to 5. Think about one-on-one combinations. The smaller the group is the less one-on-ones you need!
Decentralizing Decision-Making
When subteams make their own calls, decisions stop queuing behind me. I stop being the bottleneck every choice has to route through. Decentralization doesn’t mean chaos; it means trust by default. My job shifts from telling people what to do, to giving them enough background to make informed calls.
Ideally, I like to say: “You own the decision, I own the outcome.” This simple statement clarifies accountability without killing the autonomy. If you want faster teams, push authority downward.
Open Communication
A subteam only works if the people in it actually talk, to each other and to you. Open communication isn’t about having more meetings. It’s about psychological safety. Your team should feel free to challenge you, to question priorities, even to say “I don’t know.” You have to stop yourself. Sometimes, people are just afraid to speak up because of your authority. So, speak less. Listen more.
Open Dialogue
People speaking their minds is how trust gets built. A team that cannot say the uncomfortable thing to your face will say it to each other instead, and you will be the last one to hear about it. As a mentor, I make it a point to model vulnerability. I share when I’m uncertain or wrong. It’s amazing how quickly others mirror that openness. Self-managing teams are built on mutual honesty, not perfect consensus.
Managing Conflicts
Most disagreements on a team do not need me in the room. I encourage people to work out differences in ideas among themselves. I step in only when necessary to provide decisive guidance or to act as a tiebreaker.
Conflict is feedback. The goal isn’t to eliminate tension, but to channel it productively. If you have read 5 dysfunctions of a team. Nobody challenged each other. Why? There was no psychological safety. So, conflict is a good thing, because you want the best outcome for your group, and you will rarely reach it when nobody is willing to challenge anyone else.
Individual Strengths
Getting the most out of people means matching each one to the role that fits their strengths without letting the team fracture back into a set of individuals. This is even more important for small teams because you need to pick a good balance. You need to play it to people strength while keeping bonding between teams. It's not easy. I got called out multiple times on the latter.
Playing Individual Strengths
Matching projects to what each person is actually good at is the difference between a subteam that carries its own weight and one that constantly needs rescuing. Say you have a subteam of 3 people. Ideally, you want one of them to be comfortable with systems, one of them to have expertise in the domain and the last one might be someone who like organizing. Not a bad combo, right? Well, obviously, what's ideal depends on the domain but you probably got the point.
Bonding Activities
Trust does not form in team meetings but it forms over shared lunches, dinners out, and the things people do together once the work is set aside.
I generally do two things, both of them outside of work. The first is Guinness time, which is easy enough since I live in Ireland, and the second is making space for weekend vibes. Both give people a chance to jell once the day is done and to bring a little of their life outside the job into the room. One Guinness after work usually solves more team tension than an hour-long meeting ever will, because you learn who people really are once the laptops are closed.
Protecting Team Focus
Keeping a team focused means cutting down the noise so everyone can zone in on what they do best. Protect deep work. Create “no-meeting” windows. Shield your team from unnecessary pings.
Reducing Distractions
There is always more going on than anyone can hold at once, and every extra thread pulls attention off the work that actually matters. Part of the job is deciding what your team gets to ignore.
Ask people to come up with tasks they are working on. If there are more than 3, that's not going to work. Start prioritizing. Give them direction. Do not answer priority question yourself. Give them guidance to decide what priority might be. People do their best work when they know exactly what deserves their attention.
Unblocking
A blocked engineer does not slow down a little. They stop, and the work sits there until someone clears the thing standing in front of them. One of my managers called unblocking his superpower, and it stuck with me. If you want your people to get things done, you need to unblock their footpath.
I like to ask my teams weekly: “What’s slowing you down?” It signals that speed matters more than status. This gives you an idea where the bottleneck is. When you hear the similar thing from everyone, you know what to do.
Seeding Teams
Think of your early hires as DNA. They’ll define your culture long after you’re gone. Choose people who carry curiosity, humility, and resilience. Get those first few right and the rest gets easier, because they set the standard everyone who comes after has to meet.