An earlier version of this blog was titled "Focus- Enable - Align - Empower". I have come to think that alignment belongs before enabling: it makes skill acquisition an active activity and avoids the misconception that it is just training.
Self-organized teams are at the core of agility. This is associated with the hope that all motivation problems will vanish into thin air virtually overnight. All the greater is the astonishment when it doesn't work out that way.
Often, the conditions are not even created for teams to work autonomously: they have no information or orientation about the direction they should take. And they are expected to just work. However, the "may" must be preceded by the "can" and the "will". This also results in tasks that managers must fulfill in order for self-organization to function - and so that they can delegate responsibility with a clear conscience.
For this purpose, I present three scenarios of how this might look on a very small scale, i.e., in a sprint planning meeting, with a team in general, and as a leadership task in a company:
Focus - Provide orientation
Self-organized teams usually do not have autonomy in goal setting; this comes essentially from the outside.
- In a Scrum sprint planning meeting, this is an introduction by the product owner to his goals for the sprint.
- In a team, this is the clear and communicated product vision.
- For managers in general, that's "management by objectives" - which can be classic in a command-and-control version or agile. The latter is the topic for another blog post.
Align - make sure everyone has the same goals
Alignment actually means making sure 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, for me in this context a synonym for, well, platitudinously, obedience.
- In the sprint planning meeting, the explanation of the PBIs is followed by a discussion of feasibility and variants of implementation. This incorporates the know-how of the team, preferences and ideas from the meeting itself. Rarely does this leave a PBI unchanged, and the most important side effect is the confidence that a common understanding has been reached and that it is a result of joint work.
- In the team, alignment is an ongoing task, starting with organizing a goals workshop, and continuing with 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 was 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 - Provide information and teach skills
The next step is to ensure the "can do" of the team members.
- In the sprint planning meeting this is the establishment of a common understanding about the PBIs (Product Backlog Items), e.g. the explanation by the Product Owner.
- In the team, regular reflection on individual and joint skills and, if necessary, on the results of the training is essential. organizing learning objectives and research. This is a task of Scrum Master and Product Owner, the thematization in retrospective meetings plays a supporting role.
- As a management task, this is often described as personnel development. In an agile context, supporting long-term development is one of the key tasks of a leader.
Empower - hand over the responsibility
Now a manager can hand over responsibility: the "want" and the "can" have been clarified, now we can talk about "may":
- In the sprint planning meeting, you agree on the sprint goal and the team takes responsibility.
- The team is given the autonomy to organize the completion of tasks independently.
- In the organization, the conditions are created to live less hierarchy and more network and self-responsibility. This eliminates bottlenecks, increases motivation and the speed with which the organization can respond. It makes them, in short, more agile.
