Focus – Align – Enable – Empower

An earlier version of this blog was entitled “Focus – Enable – Align – Empower”. I now believe that alignment comes before enabling: it makes the acquisition of skills an active activity and avoids the misconception that it is just training.

Self-organized teams are the core of agility. This is associated with the hope that all motivation problems will vanish into thin air virtually overnight. This makes it all the more surprising when it doesn’t work out that way.

Often, the conditions are not in place for teams to work autonomously: they have no information or orientation about the direction they should take. And they are expected to simply function. However, the “can” and the “want” must come before the “may”. This also results in tasks that managers must fulfil in order for self-organization to work – and so that they can delegate responsibility with a clear conscience.

I present three scenarios of what this could look like on a very small scale, i.e. in a sprint planning meeting, in a team in general and as a management task in a company:

Focus – providing orientation

As a rule, self-organized teams do not have autonomy in setting goals; this comes mainly from outside.

• In a Scrum sprint planning meeting, this is an introduction by the product owner to their goals for the sprint.
• In a team, this is the clear and communicated product vision.
• For managers in general, this is “Management by Objectives” – which can be organized both in a classic command-and-control version and in an agile way. The latter is the subject of another blog post.

Align – ensuring that everyone is pursuing the same goals

Alignment actually means ensuring that you share the same goals. It is one of the most misunderstood (or misused) terms in organizations. Alignment often serves as a substitute for compliance, which for me in this context is a synonym for, well, to put it bluntly, obedience.

• In the sprint planning meeting, the explanation of the PBIs is followed by a discussion about feasibility and implementation options. The team’s know-how, preferences and ideas from the meeting itself are incorporated. Rarely does a PBI remain unchanged, and the most important side effect is the trust that a common understanding has been reached and that it is the result of joint work.
• In the team, alignment is an ongoing task, starting with the organization of a goal workshop, and continuing with the regular inspect-and-adapt, which is also a regular task for retrospectives.
• In the agile organization, a very powerful tool is the use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), OKRs were invented at intel and further developed at Google. It is a form of “management by objectives” in which goals are not cascaded but negotiated between levels.

Enable – providing information and imparting skills

The next step is to ensure that team members are “able”.

• In the sprint planning meeting, this is the creation of a common understanding of the PBIs (Product Backlog Items), e.g. the explanation by the Product Owner.
• In the team, regular reflection on individual and shared skills and, if necessary, the organization of learning objectives and research. This is a task of the Scrum Master and Product Owner, and the discussion in retrospective meetings plays a key role in this.
• As a management task, this is often described as personnel development. In an agile context, supporting long-term development is one of the central tasks of a leader.

Empower – handing over responsibility

Now a manager can hand over responsibility: the “will” and the “can” have been clarified, now you can talk about “may”:

• In the sprint planning meeting, the sprint goal is agreed and the team takes responsibility.
• The team is given the autonomy to organize the completion of the tasks independently.
• The conditions are created in the organization for less hierarchy and more networking and self-responsibility. This eliminates bottlenecks, increases motivation and the speed with which the organization can react. In short, it makes them more agile.