Team autonomy is not as simple as waving a wand.
The idea behind empowerment originated from social scientist Julian Rappaport in 19811. Empowerment emphasizes the degree of autonomy present in people and groups of people. In the 1980s and 1990s, it gained traction as a management trend. The goal was to delegate decision making authority to employees.
But it was not successful in empowering people in the workforce. Management “talked the talk.” They pronounced their people as empowered. Then, they sat back and waited for the magic to happen.
But the magic did not happen.
As it turns out, those accustomed to command-and-control have difficulty with autonomy.
Employees in a traditional management structure get told what to do and how to do it. Rewards result from adherence to the rules, not for venturing outside of them. And these employees bring experiences and biases steeped in the status quo. They have never explored other avenues.
The same is true today as we adopt Agile ways of working. Agile emphasizes self-organizing teams. The revised 2020 Scrum Guide moves beyond self-organizing teams to promote self-managing teams. But unfortunately, we follow the same patterns today as when empowerment was all the rage. We form the team, send the team to training, and wait on the magic to start.
But the magic does not happen.
Teams don’t take the reins because they were never expected to in the past. And they often struggle with where to start when solving problems. They solve every obstacle from a blank slate without the benefit of prior experience. Or they avoid them altogether.
So teams new to self-organizing or self-managing behavior tend to struggle. And this is when management takes notice. Once trouble appears, management tends to take back control and solve the problem.
Team autonomy loses.
Can we reverse this trend? To do so, we must solve three factors contributing to autonomy failure:
- Trust is missing.
- Scientific thinking is not a habit.
- Team experience is steeped in the status quo.
Let’s explore some solutions to these factors, which will enable team autonomy to take flight.
Solution 1 – Trust first and support learning
A big impediment to team autonomy is fear.
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
Before autonomous teams, most team members worked within a bureaucratic, command-and-control structure. This structure rewards following the rules of operation and not venturing beyond them. Conditioned by their past, teams fear trying something new, failing, and facing reprimand.
And teams are not alone when it comes to fear. Managers fear their teams will not take control or will fail without their direction. At the first sign of trouble, managers tend to fall back into their old patterns and take back control.
We have to break this cycle to enable team autonomy to emerge.
Truth, trust, and transparency
Instead of a wall of mistrust, we must build a bridge of trust between employees and managers.
Truth and transparency are key for enabling self-organizing and self-managing behavior. Without truth and transparency, managers can’t remove obstacles for their teams. And teams don’t know what to expect from their management.
But what comes first: trust, truth, or transparency? Do managers expect teams to earn trust through truth? Does a team need to be transparent before it receives trust? Can a team trust management not to punish them for trying something new?
“He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.”
—Lao Tzu
The solution lies in starting first with trust. If we trust first, truth and transparency will come. Trust forges a path for openness to enter.
A manager needs to embrace vulnerability and let go to allow a team to try new things. Allowing a team to face possible failure is tough. But the resulting environment of mutual trust is worth the courageous effort required.
Once management receives truth and transparency, how they respond to it is critical. Learning happens both when experiments go wrong and when they succeed. This requires managers to show Agile Leadership and celebrate problems along with successes.
When a team tries something new and it does not work out as planned, managers must resist the urge to view this as a waste. Managers must instead reward the team. This reward can be as simple as open recognition of the team’s courage to try new things and learn from the outcome.
Consistent positive response to failed experiments amplifies trust. And this reduces a team’s fear of trying new things.
Solution 2 – Build a problem-solving culture
Scientific thinking uses experimentation to solve problems. It does not come naturally to those used to a command-and-control structure. These bureaucratic structures tell employees what to do and how to do it rather than to try new things.
To break free of the status quo to follow orders, managers must coach and support teams to experiment. Managers need to cultivate a problem-solving culture. This culture expects unpredictable problems and encourages experiments to reveal the correct path.
“It’s in the doing of the work when we discover the work we must do.”
—Woody Zuill
A team should feel comfortable raising problems, supported by an environment of trust. Blame has no place in a problem-solving culture; assessing blame is a waste, and we should avoid it. To own a solution, teams and managers must first own the problem regardless of its origin.
How to support a problem-solving culture
Often, if teams don’t know how to solve a problem, they will move around the problem or accommodate it. This leads to a compromised solution and does not address the problem.
Teams sometimes ignore problems when they lack the organizational capital to solve them. This causes them to settle for the status quo. Teams need management support to break through these obstacles. The best path is often not around a problem but through it.
To support teams, managers need to get out of their office and leave the status reports behind. They need to spend time at the real place of work. Only then can they understand the problems teams face and support problem-solving efforts.
Solution 3 – Form new experiences through guided improvement
Lean thinking considers relearning and reinvention as an aspect of overprocessing waste. By not learning from those who have experienced a problem and solved it before, we repeat the past. While we will need to adjust it to our context, leveraging historical knowledge helps us.
“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
—Albert Einstein
When faced with self-organization and self-management, teams will be facing problem-solving situations anew. Rather than figuring it out on their own, guidance from others can be of tremendous benefit to a team. This guidance can come from several avenues:
- Managers: Managers have experience being a problem-solver. They often have experience solving the types of problems their teams encounter. But rather than solving the problems, the manager should guide the teams to solve their problems.
- Other Teams: Through cross-team collaboration, communities of practice, and Wikis, teams can share knowledge. Then, teams can adapt to their context.
- Coaches: Experienced coaches have worked with many teams and organizations in many contexts. They are useful in a team’s learning journey. Having a guide to correct behavior in real-time to the desired pattern can simplify team learning.
Taking it forward
To make team autonomy work, trust must be the foundation. Trust provides fertile soil for a problem-solving culture to emerge. And to build problem-solving chops, teams need to stand on the shoulders of those who came before them.
The empowerment movement fizzled out. As a manager, learn from why it failed and provide the needed support for team autonomy to flourish. An autonomous team takes time to grow, and it is not magic.
But if you tend to your garden and provide fertile soil, your crop of teams will grow strong autonomy roots. And you will reap the harvest you desire.
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References
- In praise of paradox. A social policy of empowerment over prevention, in: American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 9 (1), 1981, 1–25 (13), Rappaport, Julian
- In praise of paradox. A social policy of empowerment over prevention, in: American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 9 (1), 1981, 1–25 (13), Rappaport, Julian ↩
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.