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
