Happy Friday!

If you haven't kept up with my site, I've made a lot of changes recently. I've written a few articles and started something a little bit ambitious.

I started putting together something kind of like guides that represent my knowledge and skill sets. Its weird because some of the things I do are just intuitive and I don't necessarily have the words for them. I started with Facilitation, but I've started a mind map for team performance.

One of the parts that makes this feel approachable is that my whole digital garden concept doesn't force me to get any aspect of this right. I can just work where I want, how I want, and that is enough.

I wrote a post on LinkedIn this week about how most leaders I've coached and worked with have expressed a sentiment like, "I wish my teams would take more ownership." Guess what? LinkedIn isn't really the best place to unpack that.

So I will unpack a bit more of that here!

In my post I suggested there are three major contributors to why your teams may not take as much ownership or initiative as you'd like. There are, of course, more than three factors, but these are some of the bigger ones I address when I work with groups.

History of Correction

You might work in the best environment and be the best leader, but your employees all have a past they carry with them. Everyone has memories of when they put forth effort but were reprimanded. Everyone has memories of people who put forth no real effort and were praised, promoted, and seemed to float along happily.

People will begin to put forth effort when they feel they will not be punished for it.

This takes time and very careful interactions on your part. One wrong turn of phrase could be enough to convince someone that things aren't actually any different here.

I'm going to use an example here. Watch the eye rolls of folks when you tell them, "You're empowered."

They're rolling their eyes because they know they are not empowered, and if they did what they actually thought needed to be done, there would be hell to pay.

You've got to create an environment where mistakes are welcome, celebrate them, and the folks who are bold enough to make them.

Context

For every leader I've worked with who has wished their teams to be more autonomous, they have experienced surprise when I point out how much context they've withheld from their teams.

"I don't want to overburden or distract them with information that doesn't matter."

Imagine your teams are artists, and you ask each team to paint a single square of a painting.

When all the squares are done, the painting is, well, awful. The teams then begin to tell you what they would've done or should do and you're frustrated that you're only now hearing about it.

Except, this is also the first time they're seeing it, too. They were never told about what the painting really was, what the customer wanted, or what feelings it should capture. They were told to focus on their part of the painting.

Give them context, as much as you can. Tell them the stakes. It will not be a distraction or overburden. It is the key ingredient for decision-making.

Boundaries

That first one about overcoming their history is going to come back. Know how many times I've seen a discussion about what kinds of decisions a team is allowed to make and which they aren't?

Never.

Folks have spent their entire careers "feeling out" what they can and cannot do, and the list is very small.

Without a clear sense of what boundaries exist that the team can operate in, they have to do that based on their implicit understanding of what is safe to do, and for a lot of folks it boils down to, "Do what was asked."

Let me illustrate this with a list of things your teams aren't sure about that a conversation about boundaries can solve.

You get the idea. I bet when you're reading this, you're thinking that some of those are obvious and some aren't.

That's the point.

Without making the implicit idea of this explicit, you can't expect them to take ownership. They have no idea what they own.

Bonus

Remember Scrum Masters? This is part of what a skilled Scrum Master does.

Sincerely,

Ryan

PS: I have availability for new clients. If you need to make your software teams the best anyone has ever seen, build your next profitable product, or need a guest speaker to rattle some cages, reply to this email.