It is not possible to have self organizing team without a strong and passionate leader.
And what is even more important that he should be accepted by the team, and not the one who was “assigned” as a leader.
It is very easy to achieve teams’ self-organization when everything is clear and goes well.
But in some non-standard situations you will always observe following things:
- Hiding behind collective responsibility
- Pointing that he/she did something wrong or not well enough
- Non constructive discussions
- Highly emotional atmosphere during meetings/stand ups and etc
The Leader (you can call him a Scrum Master) must:
- Be able (not afraid) to take the responsibility fro what is happening
- Take everything into control and settle everything down
- Put team back on track
- Handle team’s and own emotions
So, i strongly believe that self organizing teams in Scrum really mean something different but i am not sure what exactly…
p.s. picture is taken from here - http://blog.3back.com/scrum-questions/what-is-the-basic-building-block-in-applied-scrum