Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: empowerment

  • Lack of Autonomy: The Plague of the Modern Workplace

    Radical Self-Organization is a way I tend to label organizational design that we adopted at Lunar Logic. It’s been dubbed The Lunar Way too on occasions. Anyway, it draws from different approaches to design organizational structure in a very flat, non-hierarchical way. Describing what we do is probably worth a separate post on its own, yet this time I want to focus on one underlying principle: autonomy.

    Our evolution toward Radical Self-Organization was experimental and emergent. Initially we didn’t set a goal of distributing authority, autonomy, and all the decision-making power across the whole organization. It emerged as a sensible and possible outcome of further evolution on the path we set ourselves onto. This means we were figuring out things on our way and quite often explored dead-ends.

    The good part of such approach is that, we wanted it or not, we needed to understand underlying principles and values and couldn’t just apply a specific approach and count on being lucky with the adoption. No wonder that on our way we had quite a bunch of realizations what was necessary to make our effort successful.

    One of the biggest of such realizations up to date for me was the one about autonomy.

    A traditional, hierarchical organizational structure that distributes power in a top-down manner is ultimately a mechanism depriving people of autonomy.

    Let me explain. Top-down hierarchy addresses challenges of indecisiveness and accountability. We ideally always know who should make which decision and thus who should be held accountable for making it (or not making it for that matter). So far so good.

    The problem is, that the same mechanism discourages managers throughout a hierarchy to distribute the decision-making power to lower levels of organization. After all, if I am held accountable for a decision, I prefer to make the final call myself. Even if I end up being wrong it’s my own fault and I don’t suffer for mistakes of others, i.e. my team.

    In short, as a manger in a traditional structure I’m incentivized to double-guess and change the decisions proposed by my team even if I go as far as consulting my calls with the team. In other words, I am discouraged to distribute autonomy.

    This has fundamental consequences. Autonomy is a key prerequisite of being motivated at work. Lack of motivation and disengagement is a plague at modern workplace. In 2013 Gallup reported that worldwide only 13% of employees were engaged. We can’t expect our team to be creative, highly productive and responsive to ever-changing business environment when they simply don’t give a damn.

    And it’s not teams’ fault. We create systems where autonomy, and as a result engagement, simply is not designed in.

    It’s not managers’ fault either. We set them up in a structure where they are punished for distributing autonomy.

    The biggest problem is that hierarchical structure is a prevailing management paradigm, which we are taught from the earliest contact with the education system. The very paradigm is the plague of the modern workplace.

    There is one important side note to mention here. Autonomy doesn’t equal authority. The two works well as a pair but neither is a prerequisite to have the other.

    I can give people authority to make project related decisions, e.g. that we terminate collaboration with a client. They can formally do it. However, if I instill enough fear of making such a tough call so that everyone is too afraid to do so people won’t have autonomy to make such a decision.

    On the other end, we may not distribute authority formally, but we may live up to the standards of “what’s not forbidden is allowed” and may believe that “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission”. In such an environment people will be making autonomous calls even if they don’t always have authority over the matter.

    Coming back to the argument about disengagement, it’s about lack of autonomy, not lack of authority. In other words, simply giving people power to make some decisions won’t solve the issue. It’s about real autonomy, which unfortunately is so much harder to achieve.

    If we agree that lack of autonomy is the problem we have quite an issue here. Since the root cause of the problem goes as deep as to the way we design organizations. Changing how we think about the domain is a huge challenge.

    The other day I was reading an article that mention a guy who opened a branch office in another city and let it run as a Teal organization with no managers and huge autonomy. His summary of his own story was something along the lines: there are 30 people with no management and they are doing great, but I think by the moment there are 50 of them we’ll hire a director.

    This shows how strongly we are programmed to think according to old paradigm. It’s like saying “it’s going great, let’s kill it because, um, my imagination doesn’t go as far to imagine the same thing in a slightly bigger scale.”

    It also shows how big of a challenge we are about to face. Simply changing how the power is distributed in an organization won’t do the trick. Unless such a change is followed with the actual change in power dynamics, enabling autonomy in lower levels of an organization it would simply mean paying a lip service. The most difficult change that needs to happen to allow for such a transformation is the one happening in the mindset of those in power, i.e. managers.

    That’s bad news. If we consider power as privilege, and I do perceive it so, it means that many managers would be oblivious to the notion that they are somehow privileged over others. It means that we first need to work on understanding of domain. Once there, there’s another challenge to face: giving up the privilege. It can’t just be done by setting up different roles. That would be simply distributing authority and that is not enough.

    The real game changer is distributing autonomy: the courage to make decisions even when—especially when—a decision would go against manager’s judgement. After all, the plague of the modern workplace is not lack of authority, but lack of autonomy. Without addressing it we should neither expect high motivation levels nor high engagement.

  • There Is No Shortage of Leaders

    I like the way Jerry Weinberg defines leadership.

    Leadership is a process of creating an environment where people become empowered.

    Empowerment

    I don’t really like the word empowerment as it is frequently used in the context of making people empowered. The way I understand empowerment such thing can’t even be done. You can’t empower me to do something.

    What you can do is give me enough positional power and possibly encourage me to do something. I can still cease to do it because of a number of reasons. I may not see value or sense in doing that. It may move me too far outside of my comfort zone. I may be afraid of peer reaction. Finally, potential consequences of failure may drive my decision.

    The way I think of empowerment is that it is intrinsic. I can feel empowered to do something. What others can do is they can create conditions that would enable that. It means anything from creating experiments that are safe to fail to shaping the environment so it supports and not discourages me to act.

    Only such way of interpreting empowerment makes Jerry Weinberg’s definition of leadership reasonable.

    Process

    What Jerry Weinberg talks about is a process. That’s unusual as typically when we think about leadership we think about individual context. How to become a leader or how to become a better leader.

    What “a process of creating an environment” communicates is that a discussion about leadership should happen in a different context. Instead of wondering how to help an individual to become a better leader we should discuss how to build an environment, or a system if you will, that supports emergence of new leaders and further development of existing ones.

    This inevitably brings to a context of system thinking.

    If we consider an organization a system there are many of its properties that influence whether, how and when people can lead.

    One of the most obvious ones would be a formal hierarchy. How rigid it is and how many levels it is built of. A hierarchy is important as it often linearly translates to power distribution. Most often it would be managers who make most decisions and influence environment around in extent.

    Then we have all the rules that people are supposed to follow. What is allowed and what is not. What stuff I have to comply to before I can do things I want. And most importantly whether everything is allowed unless rules state otherwise or the opposite: nothing is allowed unless rules state otherwise.

    Thinking of an organization as of a system from a perspective of enabling leadership is important because the system defines constraints. Normally, one can’t go beyond these constraints without risking dire consequences.

    In other words structures and rules define how much potentially is possible in terms of catalyzing leadership. It doesn’t automatically mean that fairly flat hierarchy and few rules is enough to see emergence of leadership throughout a company.

    Environment

    The bit that enables fulfilling potential created by rules and structures is organizational culture. We define organizational culture as a sum of behaviors of people being part of an organization. It’s not only abut behaviors though. It’s also about what drives them: values, principles, norms, beliefs, etc.

    Organizational culture constitutes what is an environment we work in. This is what steers how far we would go within existing structures and rules. In fact, it may even let us break the rules. It may be perfectly acceptable to for an organization to go against the existing constraints as long as it means doing the right things and is aligned with organization’s values and principles.

    What’s more, for companies that aim for good leadership distribution across the board will likely encourage such behaviors as it is a crucial condition for evolving the system and the culture.

    The hard part about organization culture is that we can’t mandate its change the same way as we can mandate for example rules change. We can’t do it as the culture is a derivative of behaviors of many people.

    What’s more we can’t mandate the change of behaviors in a sustainable manner either. We can introduce a policeman who would make sure people behave the way we want them to, but the moment the policeman is gone people would retreat back to the old status quo.

    So what can we do with the culture? We can work on constraints. This is in fact aligned with a system thinking view of an organization.

    A Process of Creating an Environment

    The bottom line of this is that most of the time when I hear complaints about not enough good leaders it is because environment is designed in a way that doesn’t let them emerge, let alone thrive.

    A litmus test that I use to quickly asses what climate there is for potential leaders would be bringing up famous Grace Hopper’s words:

    It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.

    The question to ask is how much of that attitude is present in an organization. An interesting observation is that the more people exercise that attitude the less they actually need to ask forgiveness.

    The core of it though is empowerment. On one hand it translates to taking the rules into account and then doing the right thing even it means going beyond the rules occasionally. On the other it means that an organization accepts and supports such behaviors. It requires involvement of both parties.

    It requires continuous effort to adjust rules and structures and evolve an organizational culture to reach such stage. It requires a lot of discipline across management on all levels not to break such attitude once it is present as it is fragile.

    That’s why it’s a process and not a thing. Good news is that the better you do that the more leaders would get involved and the more self-sustaining the process will become.

    At the end of the day, there’s no shortage of leaders, only a shortage of companies that let leadership emerge.