Engagement at scale looks a lot like engagement without scale.
Close your eyes and imagine you have one small, cross-functional, feature-focused product team. Engagement is high. And their success is too. The team cranks on all cylinders due to healthy doses of autonomy, mastery, and purpose1.
Autonomy abounds. They have all the capabilities on the team to own delivery of a concept to meet customer needs. Their Agile Leadership trusts them. The team determines how to meet customer needs and the desired business impact. And Agile Leadership provides the environment and support needed to get the job done.
Mastery is a way of life. The mastery the team members seek is not single-faceted. Rather, it is the pursuit of mastery in every capability needed to deliver their product. Every team member strives to develop many skills to help keep work flowing. The atmosphere is one of growth and learning through experimentation and collaboration. Their Agile Leaders provide a safe environment for this growth. Safety encourages the team to experiment regardless of the outcome. You and the team celebrate failed experiments for the learning value.
Purpose drives them. The team is clear on “why” it exists. Ask any team member and they can express their “why.” Predictive measurements of team performance are not the focus. Rather, the focus is on the value the team produces for its customers and its business. To achieve value, the team has direct engagement with its customers. This allows the team to gain empathy for customer needs. It gives them a sense of purpose. This purpose drives them to unshakable collective ownership while crafting their product. And as a result, product ownership is not isolated to the Product Owner.
A team such as this is a beautiful thing if you have ever witnessed it. Strong, intrinsic motivation courses through their veins. I am fortunate to have been a part of teams where we felt this level of all-encompassing engagement.
But as organizations have scaled to multi-team endeavors, engagement has become diluted. To be honest, I find it rare to witness the same high level of team engagement today at scale. You may be asking why this is the case. I find myself often asking the same question.
Let’s dive into some of the more common reasons why team engagement dilutes at scale. Then, we will explore how we promote it at scale.
The Dilution of Engagement At Scale
When we scale, many reasons can contribute to lower team engagement. I see it reducing to three main factors—the proliferation of silos, over-reliance on prediction, and an increase in control measures.
The Proliferation of Silos
In a scaled approach, team silos take many forms, such as the common ones below:
- Phase Teams: Requirements, design, coding, and testing teams
- Architectural Layer Teams: Front-end, common component, platform, and database teams
- Customer Teams: Customer experience, product owner, and research teams
- Strategy Teams: Executive, portfolio, or product strategy teams
- Oversight Teams: Program management offices, governance groups, standards teams, and review boards
Our attraction to silos stems from traditional management doctrine. This teaches us a team with homogeneous skillset results in high autonomy, mastery, and purpose. This could not be further from reality.
In fact, teams filled with similar skill sets and a specialized focus reduce the type of engagement we need. This optimizes for behaviors contrary to those of a cross-functional, diverse team. As a result, siloed teams struggle to keep valuable work flowing.
Siloed teams only master one aspect needed to deliver value. Local optimization disconnects them from their product’s purpose. A single-function team does not control their work. They only master one aspect required to deliver end-customer value.
As a result, the amount of dependency and waste introduced is significant. This delays learning, adaptation, and value realization. All these factors slow the engine of engagement rather than lubricating it.
Over-reliance on Prediction
When operating at scale, the stakes are high. And the complexity and uncertainty are even higher. The inability to know exactly what path to take scares us.
Early in our human evolution, making correct predictions was critical to our survival. Our brains rewarded us when we made a correct prediction. And we continue similar behavior today to predict and be successful doing so.
We focus on predicting in the midst of uncertainty. Being right drives us. We strive to control the outcome by being thorough and thinking things through. Even though we have no clear path, we trust that setting a date will motivate us to deliver. All the detail and predictive certainty give us a false sense of control and comfort.
As such, we fall victim to deadlines and details.
This becomes even more prevalent in the presence of team silos. We double down on detail. Team silos create dependencies that we have to manage. Each team in the value dependency chain gets their own deadline. We create big, detailed, upfront plans and designs to meet the deadlines we manufacture. As a result, we form a type of contract.
The inevitable outcome: complexity and uncertainty win. The contracts break down and the blame game begins.
When we try to predict the unpredictable, we become more focused on output than value. We lose our purpose. Learning slows or stops outright. Our mastery is on estimation, plans, and contracts rather than fulfilling customer needs. We lose our control to deliver value and are at the mercy of the contract.
Increase in Control
With the proliferation and over-reliance on prediction, failure is not an option. Our natural tendency is to clamp down on control. We exert this control on individuals and teams to control variance to the plan.
The contract leaves no room for innovation and learning. We must deliver on-time and on-budget for the scope we put in the contract with no impact to quality. To stay within plan, we coordinate all the dependencies. We standardize the process and deploy heavy governance. Centralized decisions funnel to those few in authority. All inspection is on the status against the plan.
The end result is the command-and-control of teams and individuals. And this is the final straw for engagement. It has no chance. There is no team autonomy. Mastery cannot flourish. And a marginalized purpose results. We succumb to serving the needs of this engine we have constructed.
Descaling Enables Scale
Adding processes, tools, and layers to manage scale leads to eroded team engagement. To go big, we will be more successful if we first go small.
This requires us to subtract traditional behaviors that sabotage us at scale. We must avoid propagating siloed teams, reliance on prediction, and control tactics. Instead, our methods should replicate at scale what works without scale. At scale, less is more.
Let’s discuss four enablers for keeping team engagement high as we scale.
1 Keep Teams Whole. The long-lived, small, cross-functional feature team works in a one-team environment. It also works in equal measure within a multi-team situation. This simple act removes complexity at scale. And it is fertile ground for collaboration. Keeping the team whole results in a large number of wasteful dependencies dissolving in an instant.
At scale, you must resist the urge to segregate skills and place like skillsets in one team. Rather, create a team comprised of cross-functional members. Each team needs all the skills needed to realize value for its customer and its business. This results in autonomy that each team can feel at scale.
Scrum teams are self-organizing and cross-functional.
Mastery in this mode is about each team pursuing a state of self-sufficiency. Each team and each team member strives to build all capabilities to deliver value on their own. This requires cross-skilling through collaboration within the team and between teams. And it results in engaged teams in complete control of their outcomes and impact.
These focused, complete teams develop a collective ownership mentality. This ownership propagates within a single team and in a group of teams focused on a common purpose.
2 Focus on Value. A common, meaningful purpose drives teams at scale as much it does for a single team. There is no purpose in delivering a certain scope within a timeline and within budget. Instead, teams at scale should focus on a common customer and business need to solve. Give them a reason “why” they exist.
To innovate at scale, each team and team member in a multi-team environment must empathize with the needs of the customer and the business. This requires direct engagement with end-users and stakeholders. Resist the urge to form proxy teams or individuals that empathize in place of the team.
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
—Aristotle
When shifting from output to a customer outcome and business impact focus, our innovative mind awakens. All team minds focused on customer outcomes and impacts are a force multiplier. Great things happen. Now, imagine how powerful multiple teams focused on outcome and impact will be.
3 Lead with Experiments. Embrace the uncertainty and complexity that product development brings. It does not vanish at scale. So we must stop trying to predict at scale. We must stop trying to define the full scope, plan, budget, and return-on-investment upfront.
Instead, we should opt for an experimental approach. This allows us to learn fast and chart our product course based on evidence. This is more akin to using a compass to chart the course rather than a map. Trying an idea and evaluating the outcome beats drawn-out, up-front prediction any day.
Experimenting at scale will create a learning environment at scale. This requires you to distribute decision making to the teams. The teams need to decide how to build the right thing and how to build the thing right.
When we use an empirical process at the team level and the system level at scale, great things happen. Many teams working together must retrospect both their intra-team dynamics and inter-team dynamics. This embeds continuous improvement for the entire system.
4 Shift Managers to Agile Leaders. To support engagement at scale, managers must shift their behavior. The shift moves away from command-and-control towards team and individual trust and ownership. This is the essence of an Agile Leader. Subtracting control and providing support will increase team autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Agile Leaders must craft an environment of safety. This will allow experimentation to flourish. To support empirical behavior, Agile Leaders must avoid rewards for predictive behaviors. Instead, they must celebrate the empirical process and learn from failure and success. This will help solidify a safe environment for learning.
Supporting the teams replaces managing the teams. The Agile Leader provides the team with the support and environment they need to get the job done. An Agile Leader will not manage the team for the things within the team’s control. Instead, an Agile Leader removes organizational obstacles that are out of the team’s control.
Sitting in an office reading reports on status is not the purview of an Agile Leader. An Agile Leader gets out of the office and visits the “Gemba”—the actual place of work. This high-touch approach provides the information they need to help the team. This will also result in a better sense of where things stand than a status report can provide.
Finally, Agile Leaders must teach their teams how to think on their feet. They must build a problem-solving culture. This requires removing the dependency on a few people to make decisions. Distributed decision-making works better. To achieve this, the Agile Leader develops problem-solving skills on all teams and team members.
Bask in Your Engagement-at-Scale Glory
What works to enhance engagement for one team also works at scale. Keeping team engagement high at scale simplifies scaling. For effective scaling, you should build a strong foundation one team at a time. You keep each team whole, focused on value, and leading with experiments. And most important, Agile Leaders provide the environment and support the team needs.
The result is autonomy, mastery, and purpose at the team and system level. These are strong intrinsic motivators and drive engagement. Whether you zoom in or zoom out, engagement is there.
When it comes to scaling, less is more. Sane scaling is possible. The key is to remove wasteful team silos, predictive wishful thinking, and an engagement-eroding focus on control. Start your journey to try engagement at scale today. It is worth an experiment to enable what makes teams great.
Also published in Serious Scrum on Medium.
- Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel H. Pink, 2011 ↩
Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.