I’ve been chatting to a group of scrum masters about issues with product owners who take too much control. This is a particular case, but it got me thinking more generally about power and influence in teams, and how misalignment can be so damaging to the collaborative and innovative processes that should be occurring.
Identifying the Problem
Team dynamic can be a very finely balanced thing. If one individual takes, or is allowed to take, too much authority in decision making, they will close down opportunities for the team as a whole to find solutions. This will crush a team’s ability to innovate new ideas and will demotivate everyone over time.
“We need to listen to our teams and be on the lookout for hints of power imbalance.”
There may be historical reasons for the particular power dynamic in a team or wider enterprise. Often those with historical management roles migrate to new servant leader positions at the start of a transformation. Without support for their growth and developing craft, these former managers cling to historical bases and methods of power. This is not their fault. Becoming a true servant leader takes a significant change in behaviour and mindset, and that only comes with the right incentives, experience and some targeted coaching.
Team members can find it difficult to call out bad behaviour in their servant leaders. This is especially true where there is a legacy of positional power. The problem will be exacerbated where wider leadership is deaf to issues or, worse still, actively shutting down these conversations. Under those circumstances, it is hard to imagine teams developing the level of trust needed with their leadership to overcome the obstacle.
We need to listen to our teams and be on the lookout for hints of power imbalance. It is our job to establish and maintain trust, letting it be widely known that we are here to help, whatever the problems. If, as leaders, we want truly productive, motivated and high performing teams, it is our purpose to help tackle these issues. So what can be done here?
Combatting Dysfunction
I believe there are two elements to power dysfunction. The first is the environment we create for our teams to work in. As we transform from more traditional organisational hierarchies to those associated with business agility, we need to transform how we incentivise people and the roles they perform. We need to demonstrate new ways to value our people and their roles and craftsmanship. If we expect more altruistic, collaborative behaviour but continue to pay and promote based on individual performance we will achieve little more than confusing our staff and disappointing ourselves when we fail to see the supposed benefits of agility.
Secondly, we need to work closely with the individuals themselves. The overstretch of authority and failure to listen to the voice of the team seldom, if ever, comes from a malign place. If it does, I think the solution is pretty obvious. Mostly, however, the issue is a lack of understanding, in either the value or boundaries of the servant leader role.
The individual is working with an older, traditional mindset. Values have been inherited from legacy ways of working. The result is a form of tyranny, yes, but it is accidental tyranny.
There are some great coaching opportunities with our servant leaders here. In my experience, we can begin to tackle power dysfunction by helping them explore three key messages.
- Understand your role and its boundaries
- Value what you do
- Trust the team and learn to let go
Role Boundaries
Traditionally, development or project managers are given the authority to define the what and when of deliveries and often drive the how. That single role can be the enemy of collaboration. It becomes too easy to make all the decisions, to tell others what to do.
Agile methodologies typically create roles with carefully set boundaries designed to maximise collaboration in teams and beyond.
So in Scrum, for example, the what, when and how are separated across multiple roles. Typically the Product Owner is given authority over feature or story creation and the ability to prioritise work order. They are accountable for the what and partly responsible for the when. Partly, because they can only determine the run order of work but need to collaborate with the team to establish the time-box and duration of the effort. The how of the solution is left entirely to the team.
The first coaching opportunity is therefore helping our people to fully understand the boundaries of the particular role they occupy and just how they can collaborate with others to best accomplish the right outcomes.
Value What You Do
Our servant leaders need to better understand the role they fulfil, why it is important to the enterprise and that they are actually valued for the work they do. When that happens, they begin to value themselves in the role, rather than feeling vulnerable and wondering if something else would be a better fit to allow them to keep a job, get paid more or get that promotion they’ve been working for.
Once people understand their own value, the magic of motivation can begin to kick in. When we value what we do, we begin to take pride in our work. We want to get better, to improve our craft. This is a positive feedback loop that incrementally generates a higher sense of self-worth, more motivation and greater performance.
Trust and Failure
The final stop on this particular transformation is for our servant leaders to begin to trust their teams to make the right decisions. This is significantly easier to write than achieve.
“The problem here is really the stigma attached to failure”
Our legacy experience has taught us that failure is a sign of incompetence. Giving free rein in decision making to our teams must surely risk failure. The obvious answer is yes, the team might fail. They might succeed wildly beyond our expectations too. More minds are better than one, and innovative ideas are more likely to emerge from a group than a single individual.
The problem here is really the stigma attached to failure. If we begin to view decisions as experiments rather than immutable laws, then a decision leading to a sub-optimal outcome is really nothing more than a learning opportunity we can easily pivot away from. With learning we develop experience. Our experiments become less prone to poor outcomes.
We should therefore be encouraging our servant leaders to enable a framework on experimentation and continuous learning. If the team doesn’t bet the farm on one decision and feedback loops are short, then the outcome won’t damage us. We can engender trust and learn to let go.
The End of Tyranny
We can create an environment that incentivises for the right behaviours and lets our people understand how we value them. In turn, they will feel more comfortable in the new roles, learning better ways to collaborate and trust. With that, we can all begin to see the end of accidental tyranny in the workplace and experience the benefits of more productive ways of working.
About the Author
Richard Williams is a fan of business adaptivity in all its many forms. He is a Visiting Fellow in the Industry Faculty at Kingston University Business School and an IC Agile authorised instructor in Leadership, People Development and Adaptive Organization Design. Richard has 25 years of experience working in delivery and product roles for a variety of FinTech and Financial Services companies. He is a transformation coach and SAFe Program Consultant.
