Not the OP, but generally self organizing generally leads to the person with the most status / soft skills doing the organizing. (Kinda fun when you are that person)
It works pretty well when there is a clear task and alignment on why it needs to get done. Unfortunately you still need someone to set expectations and resolve conflicts.
I’ve been that person before. It was good while it lasted, but some organizational changes put the wrong people in change and moved me out of that role in favor of more authoritarian rule. I don’t think I need to go into all the details, suffice to say, it left me burnt out and not too excited to volunteer for things.
I’m in a place where the team needs to self-organize again, but I’m less willing to step up, and no one else is either. Some members of the team have also been vocal with the “X is not my boss, why are they talking” line when someone tries to control the chaos. We have 2 people whose literal job is organize and run the team (a boss and a scrum master), but they either aren’t around or aren’t competent. This has left the team in a pretty bad spot. Every team needs at least one person to step up, and that person needs to be reasonably competent. Hopefully Bayer has this, as playing fast and loose with medication is a bad idea. I want the companies producing my medication to have strong and robust processes in place.
Yea, as someone who is more outspoken and has passible soft skills, I often find myself accidentally becoming team leads in ways that often end up making me a worse engineer. If I'm the only person who understands the work and can express it in legible english, I end up writing all the tickets because the Project Manager can't do it as well as me. I end up leading meetings because I understand the architecture reasonably well and can put it into words. And yet, I end up looking bad on paper because I complete very little technical work because I'm doing half of the job of 3 managers.
Sure, I'm aware of it, but having your team abjectly fail isn't good for your continued job prospects either. You shouldn't be the hero, but you also don't want to have your team get fired for want of you spending 2 hours of work a week keeping it on track.
I just want to urge you to be very careful with that. A job is - most often just a job. If you are too personally invested, you may need to take a step back and see if everyone around you is as invested.
I am not saying this from the perspective of someone who is slacking off at their job but from the perspective of someone who did too many heroics and only nearly avoided burn out. If your team gets fired because of one persons work/efforts or the lack thereof then something is seriously wrong AND there is a risky bus factor of 1. Please take my advice, the grass is always greener on the other side.
It works pretty well when there is a clear task and alignment on why it needs to get done. Unfortunately you still need someone to set expectations and resolve conflicts.