The problem: It’s so boring! Someone joins the team: Maybe they come from another area of the business or maybe you just hired them. They might have worked agile in a previous job or they might have no idea what that means. Anyway you, the agile coach, now have to bring them up to speed so they are...

Self-Selection: The ultimate booster of autonomy and engagement Imagine, just for a moment, that I walked into your organisation and asked everyone to down tools for a day and get into teams of their choosing. That I asked everyone to choose who they wanted to work with and what they wanted to work...

At age 15 I found myself part of a team I had nothing in common with: people were at least 10 years older, they were a lot better at playing handball and we had nothing in common except for a love of the game. I felt very alone and inadequate, and just tried to hang in there practicing harder than I...

Why is it that we are still obsessed with the performance of the individual in our modern team-based organisations? Shouldn’t we measure and compare teams instead? Not for the sake of competing, but to learn from each other....

1. What is self-selection? Self-selection is a way of letting people choose which team to work in. It is a facilitated process of letting people self-organize into small, cross-functional teams. It is the fastest and most efficient way to form stable teams and is based on a belief that people are at...

SPaMCAST features Tom Cagley's interview with Sandy Mamoli. We talked about teams and the book she co-authored, Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel. Sandy’s unique perspective as a world-class athlete and Agile Coach allows her to deliver options about forming teams you didn’t...

“How do I know which team to choose and what guidelines I should apply?” “How do we make sure people make good choices, not just for themselves but for all of us?” These are the two most common questions managers and team members ask before any self-selection event. This post will provide guideline...

The performance of an individual is much less important than you think it is. The way we measure, assess, evaluate and reward individual performance is no longer relevant in the modern workplace. We need to look at different behaviours and skills and instead consider the performance of the team. W...

How Travelstart used remote self-selection to create distributed teamsOnly five months after creating cross-functional teams Travelstart, a South African travel booking website, had a change in strategy and needed to rethink their team structure. From previous hackathons the company had experience w...

"Trusting people to choose who to work with and what to work on creates not only great teams but also great organisations. I have run self-selections since 2013 and have some stories to tell." In her keynote at Agile Tour Montreal Sandy Mamoli explores the idea of self-selection. Can it improve prod...

At Agile 2019 I shared 7 lessons I have learned during an Olympic career that have helped me be successful in business and life. In the world of professional sports innovation, resilience and rapid learning are everything! In this very personal talk I share key learnings from my professional and Ol...

This is the story of introducing Holacracy at Snapper, a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave Sandy a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.” Watch it here....

In this talk at the Business Agility Conference in Vienna Sandy Mamoli explores the idea of self-selection. Can it improve productivity and create happier teams? Sandy talks about her personal experience after more than five years of running Self-Selection teams in small and large organisations all...

Business is Boring is a weekly podcast presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. In this episode Sandy Mamoli talks to Simon Pound about her book Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel and an Olympic career that has taught her how to thrive in business....

Holacracy has great mechanisms to deal with governance and tactical issues. But what about the human side? What about relationships? What about our personal interactions in the workplace? Many have criticised Holacracy for not being complete, for being a system that only deals with the work and not...

The fastest and most efficient way to form stable agile teams is to let people choose their own team. This was a scary prospect when we in 2013 first considered handing over the decision making responsibility to the people affected. Fast-forward six years and self-selection has had a profound effect...