Empowering Your People and Teams

Agile talks heavily about empowering people, yet, as usual, we haven’t really provided any way to establish how to do that. I’ve spoken with many managers and leaders who are perplexed about why their teams aren’t acting empowered by telling me they are empowered.

Simply saying ‘you’re empowered’ doesn’t come close to creating the environment and culture necessary to become an empowered organization that can deliver value more effectively.

For people to be empowered, they need to understand what it is they are empowered to do.

Many leaders and managers are uncomfortable with truly empowering their people as they typically think this allows them to make large (money) or important (strategic) decisions without any approvals or review. This is NOT what we are attempting to do when we talk about empowering our people.

One of the best ways to lay a foundation for empowering people who make good decisions is by helping them understand the strategic goals of the organization and the value that is needed to support them. This is not actually all that easy as according to a Forbes article fewer than 15% of Leaders think strategy is understood and used effectively for decision-making.

Leaders must then take the responsibility to help their people understand the strategic intent of the organizations’ strategies and then define the goals and objectives of their functional area based upon those. And the final step is for the leader or manager to have a strategic view of their part of the organization. Instead of managing people’s work, they need to shift to setting a strategic roadmap for their area, what needs to be improved, and what outcomes will deliver value operationally. And then they need to convey this to their team and provide the framework to empower them to figure out the best way to deliver on the strategic outcomes that will deliver value.

For example, when I was a Test Engineering manager, I saw that we needed to have a more effective and efficient test automation capability. After talking with everyone on the team both collectively and individually, I laid out our goals and objectives and made clear that the team was empowered to make decisions that supported these outcomes. The only time they needed to check back in with me was when they were having organizational challenges or needed funding for what they wanted to do. And six months later we had a world-class test automation framework that exceeded the goals and outcomes that we started with. If I had been the only one making decisions that outcome would not have occurred.

When you hire smart people, you’ve got to treat them that way, and keeping all decision-making in your hands means your people never have an opportunity to grow and you won’t develop trust in the decision-making.

Empowering your people is about educating them on both strategic outcomes and how value should be determined, and with this knowledge, they can be prepared and empowered to make informed decisions on how to meet these goals and objectives.