What is a Self-Organizing Team?
A self-organizing team decides internally how to accomplish its work — who takes what, how to solve problems, how to improve — without task-level direction from outside. Management sets the goal and boundaries; the team owns the how. It's not absence of leadership; it's leadership relocated into the team.
The trade leaders must honor: you can hold a self-organizing team accountable for outcomes, or assign its tasks — never both. Micromanaged "self-organization" is just delegation theater.
Worked example
Given the sprint goal "invoice disputes resolvable in-app," the team divides work by conversation at the board — the developer who knows the ledger takes the backend, two others pair on the workflow UI, the tester writes scenarios first. No one assigned anything. Six months earlier a lead distributed tickets each morning; velocity is up 30% since he stopped, which he now describes as his best management decision.