Ever hear a leader say, “Our team is empowered.”
Or, “Act like you are empowered.”
Empowerment is not something bestowed upon someone. You can’t speak empowerment into existence without being intentional and putting effort into it.
If you want to empower your team, where should you start? First you need to be OK with your team making decisions without you. And, you need to be OK with being responsible for the decisions your team makes without you.
So how do you make sure the decisions your team will make are good ones? (Notice, I didn’t say how do you make sure the decisions your team will make are the same as the ones you would make.)
In David Marquet’s book, Turn the Ship Around: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, he talks about empowerment standing on two pillars: clarity of organizational vision and technical competence. Both need to be in place for empowerment to work.
Organizational Vision
You can’t expect people to make a good decision that aligns with the goals of the organization if they don’t know what the goals of the organization are. The leader who wants to empower their team needs to be clear about what the vision and goals are. And, the vision and goals need to be communicated often. (Many great leaders note that when you start to fatigue from communicating your vision and goals, you’ve just started communicating your message.)
Technical Competence
You also can’t expect your team members to make good decisions if they aren’t competent in the area you need them to make decisions in. I like to extend this to include context. For example, you hire a top-notch programmer. Until that person ramps up on your specific application, they shouldn’t be empowered to make big decisions. As a leader you need to identify gaps in competence of your team members and find ways to fill those gaps.
If you are clear on the goals – the team knows where they are going – and they are technically competent to make good decisions – empowerment still doesn’t just happen.
Environment
The next step is to consider the environment. Examine your processes and tools. Is there something you are doing as a leader the team could do instead? Are you assigning work or signing off on work? Ask yourself how you can change the environment to shift decision-making to the team.
Marquet suggests starting with smaller decisions. “Start with the rice, not the reactor.” (Marquet was the captain of a nuclear submarine and he empowered the men in charge of ordering the food supplies first and the crew running the nuclear reactor later.)
One Small Change
I had a small team of developers and testers. I was a project manager assigning testing tasks to the two testers. What I didn’t know was that I was frustrating them because I was assigning them work in parts of the product they weren’t comfortable with testing.
Luckily, I started applying Marquet’s ideas. Instead of assigning work to a particular person, I created a “test pool” user and assigned work in the tool to this new user. The testers would get notified there was new work.
The pair of testers worked out who would test what and in what order. We had regular status meetings, so I made sure priorities were clear. What I also didn’t realize was that before I made this change they never talked! Neither knew what the other was working on. After making this little change both knew at all times what was being tested and had the ability to pick up what the other was doing if needed.
Just that was fantastic! But there was another great side effect. The two testers came to the team with new process improvements regularly. They seemed to enjoy their work more and the team got more done.
engineer your life
- If you are a team member, are you clear on where your team and organization are going? Ask for clarification if not. If you are a leader, have you clearly communicated the goals and vision?
- If you are a team member, where can you increase your skills and knowledge to fill gaps in technical or contextual competency? If you are a leader, where do your team members need to improve?
- What in your processes or environment can you tweak to give more decision-making opportunities to your team?