How can empowerment lead to business agility, and what can we learn from a submarine commander?

In the digital age, market trends and customer needs change quickly, this means businesses need to be agile and responsive. Businesses which enable employees entrepreneurial spirit, empowering people to come forward to innovate and transform are effectively using the collective of all the employees brains rather than those just in Leadership and results show they perform better.

The State of Agile report (14^th edition), reflecting insights from 1,100 business & IT professionals globally, shows organisational culture is still the biggest blocker to business agility.  Organisation and culture are at odds to Agile ways of working, which calls for self-organising Agile teams, with leaders who can ‘let go’ of some of their control, enabling teams to come up with solutions and implement what the business and the customer needs.

How can managers become leaders and build business agility through empowerment?

Management structures have traditionally been in place for procedure and policy to be governed. Agility calls for the entrepreneurial or ‘hidden’ network of an organisation to be used. Leaders need to embrace ‘servant leadership’ to allow their teams to self-organise and collaborate around the work. This means:

1. Setting clear expectations and objectives for the team.
2. Ensuring the team members have the competency and skills needed to do the work – and supporting them with coaching and training wherever needed.
3. Asking coaching questions of the teams: what do you think, what do you recommend, what would you like to do…
4. Building a safe space for experimentation.

But this does not mean being negligent or not having the appropriate safeguards in place. For example, an approvals process is still needed for permanent long-lasting decisions.

Teams can also reverse coach the leadership to encourage empowerment, using questions such as “I want to help you deliver more value” or “I have been looking at this problem, and I think we have several options and one I would really recommend is…”.

What can we learn about agility and empowerment from a submarine commander?

I attended a Scaled Agile, SAFe Programme Consultant course a few weeks ago. In the context of team empowerment, they shared a simple animation about Captain David Marquet, submarine commander, and his experience as documented in his book and TED talk:  ‘Turn the Ship Around’.

On faced with needing to put himself and his crew in another boat and operate it, Captain Marquet realised he couldn’t learn how to operate the boat and then instruct his crew in the timescales he’d been given.

“I was trained for one submarine. My guys were trained to do what they were told. That’s a deadly combination.” 

He needed months of training to get close to knowing what he needed to know and would then need to train the crew. So? He delegated. He empowered his crew to work out what was needed. He retained accountability for the big decisions but allowed his team of engineers and technically competent staff to work through their own operating procedures and know what was needed themselves.

Of course, he is not the first, and no doubt the last, to describe or document how a change in leadership style can remove blockers, empower and enable a team, but his story is a great example to draw on when explaining and understanding the power of empowerment. Scaled Agile makes it clear that the whole organisation has to organise around a Lean-Agile and DevOps mindset to achieve business agility.

How can you build empowerment into your own working relationships, your teams and your leadership?

1.  Self-organisation and empowerment does not mean a team left to their own devices and neglected, but a guided, encouraged capable and competent team.

1. 1. 1. Ensure all team members are clear on their role and what contribution, impact and purpose that role has.
      2. Ensure all team members have SMART objectives.
      3. Be clear on what they are authorised to do, and when they need to seek approval or guidance.
      4. Provide them a forum to come together and discuss, review, and reflect on what they are doing. In Agile terms, a daily stand up, a team board, and regular retrospectives are all great tools.

1. 1. What issues are you facing every day as a team member that are wearing you down? What conversation do you want to have with your leadership to discuss those issues, with potential solutions and recommendations?
      1. 1. Formulate your thoughts before heading into a discussion with the leadership.
         2. Collaborate with other team members, peers, and others in your network to pull your recommendation together. But don’t paralyse yourself with analysis.
         3. Always remember that simplicity counts for a lot, and favour interactions with people and conversation over lengthy documentation.
      1. 1. 1. Write down the issue as a ‘problem statement’
            2. Include the size and scale of the issue – it happens x number of times in y period of time, the impact of it happening is z. Include time, error, cost, customer, people impacts…
            3. Then outline the options, including a ‘do nothing’ option which will most likely leave the situation the same, or could also make it worse e.g. by further reducing market share, or customer satisfaction, or increasing costs.
            4. Then make a recommendation. What you think the organisation should do. Make sure that the other options and the impact assessments make it clear why you are making this recommendation

1. Where do you or your team need to increase capability and competency?

1. 1. What do your team feel they are missing or short of in terms of knowledge or expertise?
   2. Who do you have in the organisation or in your close network who can help? What free or low-cost resources are available to you?  The appetite for ‘formal training’ and putting everyone in a classroom for a week is probably low.

1. 1. 1. Organise a 60-90 minute ‘lunch and learn’ or ‘brown bag lunch’ for people to learn by hearing a presentation and then having time to discuss the learnings.
      2. Or hold a shorter 30-45 minute ‘coffee morning’ session to watch a video or attend a webinar, and discuss the learnings.
      3. Professional bodies, consultancies, implementation partners and software providers have many – often free – resources.