Being a leader, not a boss. This simple phrase is well known to everyone. However there are lots of situations in real life when team lead takes full control within their teams, leaving team members without any autonomy in decisions and actions.

Same was in Booking.com some time ago. Team leads were the only people responsible for teams processes, people, meetings and everything. But then organization began to grow tremendously. We realized that for successful growth we need to change management paradigm. We need to provide more opportunities to people, motivate them. We implemented autonomous teams: no more team leads, every team member is equally responsible for team's success.

Even though that experiment was stopped after a while, we had lots of useful learnings, which then defined what a team leader means now. Today we have Servant Leadership as a main leadership paradigm in teams. It means team members still have some autonomy, but there are team leads to keep things under control.

From the talk you will learn how Booking.com implemented autonomous teams, what went well and what failed, and how does it all work today.