Empowered cross-functional teams are the agile organization’s engines for creating customer value. Agile leaders play a critical role in creating the right conditions for these teams to take ownership. By enabling teams to form themselves, leaders set the tone and expectations for teams’ self-management and accountability.
Unfortunately, many traditional leaders send the wrong message from the start. They determine what the organization is going to deliver (their product or service), then decide the process by which the organization is going to deliver the product, and finally form teams to follow the predefined process to deliver the predefined product. The result is disengaged teams who passively follow a process to deliver products and services that don’t meet customer needs. Sound familiar?
As they help teams to form, agile leaders also help those teams discover their purpose, thereby enabling them to focus on the customers and their desired outcomes. Rather than dictating solutions to teams, agile leaders give the teams permission to better understand their customers and devise innovative solutions that meet their needs, and then refine these solutions using delivery-feedback loops.
Changing the Organization, One Team at a Time
“Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.”
1. Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Random House, 2014).
While organizations are often tempted to aim for broad adoption of agile techniques, they are rarely rewarded with success. What begins with well-intentioned sharing tends to end in unfocused, watered-down superficial agility that does not build a foundation for success. The fundamental building block of an agile organization is the strong, empowered, self-managing team. Building such teams takes time and conscious investment, protection from hostile forces, and support and nurturing for a new way of working. Forming new teams around new initiatives, staffed by people who actually crave a new approach to their work and their teammates, is the best way to start fresh, unburdened by existing team member dynamics, roles, and processes.
The worst approach is to try to change an existing team or department, which already has solidified working relationships and behavior patterns. Changing the way of working inevitably changes team dynamics and threatens status relationships. While breaking up existing teams may seem costly and unproductive, trying to change the way an existing team works is nearly impossible; there are simply too many entrenched behavior patterns standing in the way.
The second worst approach is to assign people to new teams,2 some of whom will see no reason to change. Forcing people to change is always a bad idea; a better approach is to find people who want to change, invite them to form new teams, and then help them, rather than trying to convince people who are resistant to change to work in a different way. Some organizations try to facilitate change by hiring external coaches to catalyze the change, but having to work with people who don’t want to change in the first place already puts them at a disadvantage.
2. Even with their consent. The mere act of asking someone to do something can be coercive. People naturally want to please others, especially those in positions of authority, and the act of asking someone usually comes with a tacit expression that the person asking thinks it is a good idea. Employees may not feel they can say “no” without suffering negative consequences.
Using external coaches is not necessarily a bad idea (each of the authors has played this role from time to time), but external coaches are expensive and good ones are hard to find. There is also a limit to what someone from outside the team can do to help a team change and grow. They can help a team to learn new approaches quickly, but they can also become a crutch that prevents the team from becoming accountable for their own growth. When you do need to use coaches, do so with the intention of making them superfluous as soon as possible. When they do, move them on to help another team, and so on.
This approach is much more effective than what many organizations do: hire lots of external coaches and spread them thin across too many teams. When the organization takes this path, the teams get frustrated because they aren’t progressing, the coaches get frustrated because they are achieving little impact for the efforts, and executives in the organization are frustrated because they see little return on the money they are spending. Such an approach damages trust and often leaves members of the organization demoralized and believing that the organization is incapable of change. It may indeed be incapable of change, but it’s not the fault of the coaches; it’s the overall approach. You can’t outsource change.
“People don’t resist change. They resist being changed.”
—Peter Senge
Finding the Right People
These qualities select for people who are flexible and have demonstrated both the desire and the ability to work with others to solve problems. Using these criteria may exclude some otherwise high-performing individuals who are skilled but less willing or able to work as team members. The ideal team consists not of individual high performers, as some traditional managers might believe, but rather good, solid performers who know how to channel their energies into helping the entire team perform better.
Team self-selection can unleash the passion and intrinsic motivation of the team members, and it sends a clear message that working on the new team will be very different than the team members have experienced before. It is empowering, but also reinforces the message of accountability: Teams are allowed to form themselves around a goal, but the organization expects that team to be accountable for their results.
The team-forming workshop also emphasizes the importance of having a balance of skills across team members, which the team members achieve by discussing the skills that they think each team will need to be successful. Since the team members are closest to the work, they are the best people to make decisions about the skills the team will need. This is a big change for traditional managers to accept.
You might even ask, “If team members form their own teams, what is the role of the leader?” The case study illustrates the answer: Nagesh and Doreen establish the overall goals for the team and set the boundary conditions for how team formation will work. In addition to solving certain customer-related problems (e.g., energy generation and storage), they indicate that they want the teams to form so that the skills of each team are broad and deep enough to achieve the team’s goals.
The skills needed may vary from team to team, and establishing the connection between skills and goal achievement helps to counter the tendency for teams to become homogeneous with respect to their skill and personality composition. Team members need diversity in both aspects to be creative and continuously challenge each other. For example, without a nudge from the leaders, extraverted team members may choose people like themselves and miss out on having more diverse viewpoints from members who are more introverted but think deeply about a problem and possible solutions.
Empowering Teams
Traditional organizations manage people to a plan; deviations from the plan indicate that something has gone “off track.” The problem with this approach in a complex world is that it might be the plan that is wrong and the team that is doing the right thing. In fact, most plans are based on scant information and are prepared by people who, although they are doing their best, are just guessing about the right thing to do.
Managing to a plan feels comfortable because it allows an organization to measure activities and outputs, but leads to a false sense of security that it’s doing the right thing. The problem is that those activities and outputs often have nothing to do with actually achieving the results the organization wants. So what’s the alternative? Measure outcomes delivered directly, but do it frequently, and inspect and adapt based on the new information obtained.
Empowering a team to make its own decisions about how to reach a goal is really the foundation of empowerment. And since the team members are closest to the work itself, they are usually in the best position to make decisions about what work they should do and how to do it. But with this decision-making freedom comes accountability for delivering the customer outcomes that form the basis for the team’s goals.4
4. We cover empowerment and delegation strategies and techniques in greater depth in Chapter 4. The purpose of the techniques discussed there is to establish clear boundaries for a team, arrived at through mutual agreement between leaders and agile teams. These “guardrails” help the team to grow their self-management while respecting that they are usually still learning how to effectively self-manage.
With decision-making freedom comes accountability for delivering customer outcomes.
Placing the Customer at the Center of the Change
Teams need a powerful purpose to really come together; they need a mission that motivates them to make shared commitments to the organization and to each other to achieve that mission. They need to understand why they exist as a team. Expressing that why in terms of helping customers to achieve particular desired outcomes is the best way to really motivate team members.
Many teams think of their customers in terms of personas.8 Some teams with which the authors have worked have even gone so far as to create posters of the customer personas and hang them on their team room walls to remind themselves of who they are really working for. This technique turns abstract discussions of customers into very focused discussions about what real customers really need.
It’s easy to think of team formation as a two-step process: first form a great team (the who), and then point them toward an interesting problem to solve (the why). In reality, it’s not so straightforward. The why influences the who, and vice versa. In the case study, many of the people who volunteered for the team had a deep personal interest in the problem that they presumed the team was going to solve. In turn, those people brought their insights into the discussion of who the customers are and what they want to achieve, which influenced the team mission.
Sometimes it takes a while to get this right. You start off thinking that the problem is one thing, but as the team delves deeper into the customers and their needs, you discover a different problem that changes who needs to be on the team. In addition, sometimes team members might think they want to work on a problem, but as their understanding of the problem grows, they may realize that they aren’t as interested as they thought they were.
There is also another dynamic at work during this formative stage: The people on the team have to be able to work together. That doesn’t mean that they all have to be great buddies, and they may not always agree; in fact, creative differences can power amazing team results. But they have to respect one another enough to be able to work through those differences, and some combinations of potential team members are just never going to work.
Leaders provide critical space and structure for the team to work through these dynamics. They nudge a little when necessary, but they don’t dictate the final decisions. It’s a challenging situation to “manage,” because they want to grow the team’s confidence in their own abilities by empowering them, but they also need to keep an eye on how the team dynamics are evolving. Do team members seem to be able to work together? Are they developing shared commitment around their team goals? Will achievement of those team goals contribute to their organization’s ability to achieve its strategic goals?
There is a lot of uncertainty at first, and it’s the leader’s job to help the team to overcome those uncertainties, at least enough to start taking their first steps toward their goals (see Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4 Helping teams to form starts with focusing on team membership (who) and team goals (why).
Figure 2.4 reveals a pattern that is often the key to a successful agile transformation: Start with the WHO (the right people with the right leadership skills) and combine that with the WHY (understanding your customers and turning that into a mission that everyone understands). Once the WHY and the WHO are filled in, it becomes much easier to make choices about HOW to create value and WHAT to do (and even more important, what not to do).
Many organizations approach agile change the other way around: They start with a portfolio, product backlogs, and agile processes; then they create an implementation strategy; and as a last step, they try to motivate everyone to take part in the change. No wonder, then, that people so often are not fully engaged in the change.
Chapter 3 explores how leaders help teams to discover how they are going to work and, in turn, what they are going to deliver to their customers.
Turning Customer Needs into Team Purpose
Reflections on the Journey
When leaders seek to make their organizations more agile, they often seek some sort of “shortcut” that can help the organization quickly change. In doing so, they fail to understand how embedded the existing way of doing things is in their organization. The only practical way for organizations to change is team-by-team. More than one team can be learning and changing at a time, if the leaders and the teams have enough bandwidth, so long as leaders help the teams to form and learn.
The starting point is to help teams to form from volunteers—that is, letting people choose who they work with and what they work on. Assigning people to teams and telling them what they are going to work on is the first false step many leaders make. The engine of agility is the self-managing team, and if the team members cannot be trusted to form their own teams, they will never be able to make the kind of complex decisions that they will need to make.
As these teams form, their values need to be focused on meeting unmet customer needs, expressed in terms of gaps between the customer’s current experience and their desired experiences. Closing these satisfaction gaps will become the focus that gives the team purpose and provides them with the motivation they need to achieve great things.
