Empower Teams

One key element for a new way of working are self organized, cross-functional and competent teams. In order to achieve this, it is usually not enough to just to tell the teams to self-organize. It is the role of the organization to ensure that teams are able to do this. We call this to empower teams: To enable and align the team towards problem solving, decision making and learning from failures.

Most business owners, managers, leaders or directors desire to have a team, which just understand, what is right, proactively decides what to do next and is taking the responsibility to achieve the common vision. This allows the leaders to focus on other important activities and trust within the team is installed.

In a lot of conversation with leaders, we can see, that this level of trust is nearly always missing on both sides and therefore teams are not taking the chance or are not achieving their full potential.

Trust is a 2-way street

Empowered teams are teams who are receiving and giving trust. Empowered teams are teams, which are not afraid to try something, because they know, that if they fail, it would not be a big deal. Creating such a safe-to-fail environment is important for individuals & teams to step up and act proactively. However, from the point of the leader, it is difficult to achieve: It is easy to say to individuals, that it is ok to fail; but what impact will it have on the whole environment, team or organization? What if the failure of one individual will cost too much money for the whole organization?

Therefore, a safe-to-fail environment follows 3 simple rules:

1. Understand, that failing might happen - and accepting this.
2. To ensure to understand, when there is failure - and not keep investing more into a failing idea.
3. To ensure, that failing is survivable - and make small experiments first and scale only when successful.