Responsibility: the Game of Give and Take

Perhaps you have also encountered this: you have given responsibility to a team, hoping that they know what to do and don’t want (and need) to be micro-managed. And it misfired and crashed very badly. As we are moving and solving more and more complex in our work, we try to place more and more emphasis on networks, teams and delegating responsibility to people actually doing the work. But, for many, this is a huge shift from what they have experienced so far. And giving responsibility is no an one-way act: there must also be somebody to take it.

The power of teams

Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right. — Henry Ford.

We all know that teams are powerful. Teamwork, the combined wisdom of multiple people, the different perspectives people look at things and the learning that happens within a team is what makes agile teams ultimately successful.

But, to make the teams really powerful, self-organizing and self-sufficient, we often run into problems. The main reason behind this is that for generations, people have been used to being managed, being told what to do, without taking any responsibility from their actions.

This is the legacy of the so-called theory X mindset, which simply put says that people are generally lazy, don’t want any responsibility and will work only for their paychecks. Management response to this is you micromanage people and punish them if they misbehave.

Unfortunately, this theory is self-fulfilling — if you want to see others as lazy and incompetent, they will actually in your eyes start behaving exactly as you expect them, which is a problem many managers are doing — because they have a theory X bias, they put controls in place, which makes people respond in a way that reinforces managers’ beliefs people need to be controlled, ending in a spiral and inflicting this nonsense also into the minds of other people.

So, is there a way to break this?

Responsibility and competence

They must consider that great responsibility follows inseparably from great power. — French National Convention, 1793.

The solution seems to be simple — just give people the freedom. Delegate the responsibility and everything will be fine. But sadly, it most probably won’t. If we give power to the people, to our cross-functional teams, we must do so wisely. Many times, the teams don’t know how to deal with the power, often because:

• it may be their first time nobody is watching them and telling them what to do, which is a huge mindset for anybody,
• they simply don’t know what the goal is, what they are supposed to achieve,what results are expected from them.

To make teams truly powerful, responsible and self-organized, I believe there are a couple of things we need to have in place:

• the team and all the members need to know exactly what the expected result is — what we want them to achieve (not how they should achieve the goal, but what the goal is, why is it important and how do they know the goal has been met),
• the teams need to have the necessary skills to achieve the goal (whatever they might be),
• the team should have the opportunity to consult and ask for advice in case they need help,
• the team should agree they really want such power and responsibility, because giving and taking a responsibility and power is a two way relationship.

Advancing one step at a time

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. — Vincent Van Gogh

Usually, the delegation of power is something that does not happen overnight. Luckily, there are several tools that may help us discussing delegation and promoting team learning and responsibility. The ones I would recommend are:

• Delegation boards: a part of Management 3.0, these are extremely useful when discussing with teams what responsibilities do they want fully delegated and what do they want to do together with other parties. Apart from this, I have found delegation boards extremely useful in sparking conversation about why the teams want such a delegation and what would help them to gain even more control, allowing for delegating more things. They are also useful in the opposite case when team really wants a responsibility, but the manager does not want to give it to the team.
• Ladder of Leadership: similar to delegation boards, a part of intent-based leadership devised by David Marquet, this also helps to clearly set expectations and delegation levels and promote pushing responsibility to the teams actually doing the work.
• Information radiators: people tend to forget things, especially if they have too many information to focus on. So you should be careful about what information to give and the really valuable ones you should keep at a visible space so that everybody is constantly reminded of them. This may be the case of goals, decisions regarding what is delegated and others.
• Measurable goals: when you set the goals, make sure they are measurable. Not in a sense you will be daily asking for progress and drawing some fancy charts, but in a sense that everybody knows how they know they actually achieved them.
• Experimenting and learning: there are various tools and techniques to help with learning. Firstly, you should make it clear that failure when you try something is normal and you should learn from that — you may want to use another part of Management 3.0 — the Celebration grid. Also, promote team learning — probably, you already have people that are experts in some areas that can teach others and vice versa. And, allow people to pick their own trainings that will help them to gain more knowledge and subsequently take more responsibility.

Warning signs that things are going out of hand

The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management. — Douglas McGregor

If you, like me, have tried to give power to the teams and failed because there was no one on the other side to take it and use it responsibly, you probably know these warning signs that delegation might be getting out of control:

• people asking who is going to ensure we actually do this?: that indicates lack of ownership and potentially may lead to people trying to game the system if they believe no-one can blame them afterwards,
• people taking the power, not using it and then blaming others: usually this indicates lack of clarity or people not identifying themselves with the goals (or not knowing what the goals are),
• people multitasking and saying that priorities are unclear: again indicative of lack of organizational clarity and clear goals that people can identify with,
• people talking about artificial problems and avoiding the real ones: often this means that people fear failure as something bad might happen to them (it might be true or only self-imposed).

Building responsibility

Solution to all the problems above is simple, but very hard: you need to provide clear goals, ensure that everybody understands them and is able to identify with them and then support and coach people as they gradually take more and more responsibility.

This is a long-term initiative, an investment you make. At the end, you will hopefully have some really motivated and emancipated teams that make their own decisions, think about the problems and achieve the goals with much more ease than you would be able managing them.

Start with small steps, perhaps not delegating anything, but starting with having the teams (or people) come up with a solution and then “sell” it to you, whilst you support them along the way and offering support and coaching along the way. That way, you can generate and instantly recognize success, reinforcing teams desire to take more responsibility and become truly self-organized.