Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash
From time to time, I tend to brain-dump things that get stuck in my head and post them into one of our Slack channels at work.
A while back, I wrote this piece about transparency related to empowered teams, and as this might be relevant to others, I figured I‘ll make a blog post.
But before we dig into the topic of this post, we need to define what an empowered team is. To me, empowered teams mean that the teams can make aligned, autonomous choices toward solving a problem. Autonomy is an essential driver for individuals and teams at the organization and company levels. It speeds us up, giving us the freedom to make small and big decisions without involving too many stakeholders. But, as with any choice, there are pros and cons. — In this post, I’ll outline how we tackle continuous alignment when teams are empowered.
Autonomy without alignment is like a guide having many individual thinkers on a ski-touring trip when bad weather comes along. The guide expresses concern and recommends everyone to ski down the mountain. They turn around and slide down the mountain without taking the time to align. Since the individual thinkers on this trip are used to doing what they think is best without aligning with others, everyone ends up skiing down their separate ways, and we can easily imagine the following disaster.
Alignment is necessary to ensure that everyone moves in the same direction, thereby reducing the risk of people ending up alone and in entirely different places. Unfortunately, I have observed that too many omit the align part when dealing with empowered teams. Aligning on strategy and goals is something I know we are very good at in our organization! In theory, we follow the tight-loose-tight principle by having Planning Weeks every quarter and a more extensive planning every half year to gather and align the whole organization in a top-down-bottom-up process. We discuss everything from our ways of working to where we want to go in the next quarter and the next 2–5 years. We also share strategic context and set goals. Of course, there is always room for improvement, and we look for improvements every time, but I also feel the way we do it works beautifully!
After we have completed our planning weeks, we move into the loose part. Every team starts building and learning, steering toward an aligned future.
If you are not transparent, you diverge
Even though our empowered teams are aligned after our planning weeks, and we all move towards the same goals, it’s when we build and learn actual movement happens within the teams. When one learns new things, one needs to adjust. Adjusting rapidly is one of the capabilities empowered teams should have. As a consequence, learning and adjusting happen all over the company, continuously and at a fast pace, without the direct natural involvement of others. The lack of stakeholder involvement increases the chances that teams will diverge. That is why each team needs to invest time in transparency to remain aligned. Updating goals and achievements is part of this, and many have landed on OKRs for this purpose.
Being genuinely transparent means much more than updating OKRs
In a sizable and global organization, it’s not possible for one person to be involved in every discussion and have all the context. Each day, across time zones, in every corner of the organization, we make decisions where context matters. The more perspectives and context we have from clever heads spread across a company, the better decisions and solutions we will get. If you think about it, you can threat information and decisions in the same way as with your product; the sooner you get something viable and testable out to your customers, the faster you learn and adjust, one small iteration towards a better result. So making information and decisions available, easily accessible, and digestible to get feedback as early as possible is critical to stay aligned.
It’s essential to know that in an empowered way of working, decisions are just decisions until the team gets more context or better ideas. We work iteratively, and most decisions are possible to adjust. You need culturally to feel that it is more than ok to make decisions, but also share perspectives on decisions made without feeling that you step on anyone’s toes. In an organization like this, decisions are made fast, but it should be possible to change easily!
To increase the chances of getting perspectives and context, we have made deliberate cultural choices within our organization. One example is reducing the use of email or direct messages on slack or similar chat applications. Instead, we push ourselves to use open channels which others can quickly join.
We also encourage our employees to use inclusive formats for information sharing and discussions, one of the formats we call PTAS (people talk about stuff). PTAS was created during covid when everyone was suddenly remote and was trying to simulate random coffee chats or talks happening at the office. The template is one topic, a public zoom link, and a date. Then share it in an appropriate slack channel. Anyone is free to join or listen to the following discussion. Sometimes it is recorded, but we do not require it because we want to keep the bar for creating a PTAS as low as possible. As some employees returned to our offices in person, we saw the random office talks starting to pick up again. At the same time, we noticed the lack of transparency and inclusiveness these talks provide for people not at the office, and we are taking steps to encourage more use of the more inclusive PTAS format again.
We also have a cultural document describing a goal of “Your ability to participate and contribute at work should not be affected by your preferred working hours or location.” and three simple principles to follow to ensure transparency and inclusiveness.
- Try to reduce the time you spend in meetings, consider other ways of sharing information and ways of working!
- Some communication is best done synchronously, but remember: be inclusive!
- Make decisions in an inclusive way.
Asynchronous* ways of working encourage transparency in a better way than synchronous* work does, but we need to be able to do both while still ensuring transparency and inclusiveness; this is what the principles are trying to guide. Of course, we also have a ton of other alignment structures, as taking alignment seriously in an empowered teams organization is of utmost importance. Have we nailed this yet? No, working with transparency and alignment is similar to working with product development; you are not done until the company or product is shut down for good. It takes time, repeating, learning, and adjusting- over and over again!
What’s my role as a leader in all this?
Do you even need leaders in this setup, where the teams are empowered and excellent at continuous alignment by being transparent? The short answer is yes, and I’ll explain why. As pointed out, transparency is not something you can check off and regard as finished. Ensuring that structures are in place to help teams be more transparent is needed, and I focus on this. By design of the system, the empowered teams have a laser focus on their mission, which also means that the gravity towards inward thinking is strong. Slipping on communication outwards and seeking information is something I see many teams need to be reminded of from time to time, and as a leader, I help with this. Primarily by nudging leaders in a team, as nudging when the cultural part is there already is effective. If there are more broken cultural problems, we work with the teams to help them see the why’s and the outcome we are looking for to get them on board. Coaching is an effective way of working with the teams directly, as you need them onboard with the thinking to get them empowered.
A natural part of the job is observing all sub-organizations and teams. Consequently, I get a broad perspective that makes it easier to see organizational patterns and implement or suggest system changes. Just consuming content and organizational movement takes a lot of time. For example, I follow all team Slack channels and read them daily to get context. To create good strategies, you must have the context that lives inside your organization and teams.
In addition, I work outwards into the even broader organization and customers, which gives perspectives and context that I can use to inform the directions of the teams. Sharing this context is very important as it improves team decisions. From time to time, I also go into teams and help directly, but in most cases, that is mostly about asking the right questions to help them move forward. I also see myself as responsible for keeping updated on the latest and greatest ways of working. For me having a network of peers in similar organizations and a gang of sparring partners has been truly fruitful. Also, having a link to multiple inspiring startups is a constant reminder that you can innovate on a considerable amount of different things within an organization.
The principles of servant leadership are often interpreted as you don’t get to have your own opinions or I should be hands-off as the teams are empowered. My interpretation is that you should be more hands-on to understand where you should put your efforts to help out, whether it is with context, direction, structural changes, fixing gaps, coaching, guidance, or other means that create more optimized teams and organizations to create value fast for our customers. In terms of knowing where to help, I like to make a visual example of a surfer who is looking for the waves they should or should not prioritize to tackle, but in this case, the surfer is looking for the worst ones as he has the ability to make them great to surf.
To summarize
Be aware that others outside your circle could benefit from the information you hold and that you can contribute with questions and different perspectives on contexts shared. Think about how to be transparent so members who cannot attend synchronous meetings or other people can contribute with their perspectives. Think about it when you choose collaboration tools. Think about it when you write summaries; even consider write and share something about a small discussion that happened and is happing all over the organization daily. As a leader, share context, share context, and share context! I truly believe that focusing on transparency in empowered organizations and teams is the key to unlocking even more efficiency, alignment, and user value for our customers!
*Asynchronous — Describes events that do not happen at the same time. An asynchronous way of working means that collaboration does not happen in real-time but with written documents/videos etc. that are shared and consumed between people.
*Synchronous — Describes events that happen in real-time. For example, live discussions. Synchronous work does not necessarily mean co-located, it could for example be a meeting on zoom.