I see leaders do this all the time where they really want to do the right thing and share authority. Then a decision happens that they didn’t like, and they say ‘whoa, don’t make that decision!’ That’s not empowerment, that is exactly the thing we’re trying to avoid. This approach helps leaders anticipate those situations and go after them proactively.
These days, every leader seems to want empowered individuals and teams. But how do you actually get real empowerment? Just saying, “You’re empowered!” doesn’t seem to work reliably. In this Humanizing Work Community Meetup session, we explored a step-by-step path to increasing an individual or team’s empowerment in a particular area of responsibility. We walk through how to use this approach on two real examples, a COO that wants to empower their team to make M&A decisions, and a Product Leader that wants to empower developers to own decisions around a big change to the pricing model.
Referenced Resource
Humanizing Work’s 3 Jobs of Management Model
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Episode Transcription
Richard Lawrence
Welcome to the Humanizing Work Show. In this episode, we’re sharing the recording of our September 2023 Community Meetup session, where we talked about a practical method for increasing an individual’s or team’s empowerment in a particular area of responsibility. Just declaring you’re empowered is rarely sufficient. So we talk through what to do instead.
Peter Geen
We covered an earlier version and honestly a simpler version of this idea in episode 67. But in this meetup, we added a new way to visualize and work through its application. So we’ve cut together a few parts from that quick explanation from the earlier episode and added the new content from the meetup recording.
Richard
We host these free live community sessions on the third Thursday of every month. If you want to attend future sessions where you can participate in the live chat in the Q&A, sign up at humanizingwork.com/meetup. All right. Welcome, everybody. Tonight, we’re talking about a practical approach to real empowerment for teams and individuals. We’re talking about this because there’s a lot of talk about empowerment in the kinds of orgs that we work with.
But that good intention often breaks down in the execution, whether it’s individuals and teams don’t actually get meaningful authority or it’s just unclear; or often people don’t have what they need to use the authority they have. And so we’ll address all of that tonight.
Peter
All right. Let me share a thing that happened to me. So this was in May of 2014. I was working at Adobe– and at Adobe, they had adopted this kind of creative cloud where you had to log in. And then I had a subscription and things like that. And then in May of 2014, the entire system went down for a whole day.
And at the time, really the only way you could access the apps was if you were logged in and continuously connected to the Internet. So it was a huge problem. It made major headlines, as you can imagine. People basically locked out of their tools. Photoshop Acrobat. I mean, I do a ton of video editing for the Humanizing Work Show and a bunch of image creation for all of the stuff we do.
And I can’t imagine Creative Cloud just being gone for a day. I basically have to– I don’t know– draw with a pen or something. I mean, this obviously had a big impact for the company, but a huge impact for the customers and employee morale and all the things that you can imagine going wrong in a situation like this. And at the time, I’d been leading the Agile transformation for several years and shortly after the outage was fixed, right, it took them a day essentially to figure out what had happened and fix that. One of the executive vice presidents asked me to conduct this big, large lessons-learned postmortem to discover what had led to the outage in the first place and what we should do to prevent something like this from happening ever again. And I was excited about that, but also a little bit leery because I could imagine the outcome of that type of lessons-learned or postmortem being primarily technical, which would probably be useful.
But my suspicion was that it wasn’t just a technical problem, that that wasn’t going to be enough. So when the VP asked me if I’d be willing to do this, I asked them, “Hey, what level of change would be kind of digestible as a result of this postmortem?” and Brian’s response, the VP’s response was, “Adobe needed to change its DNA to be a services company.”
And I was like, “Okay.” He basically was telling me whatever level of change was needed to change the DNA of the company, that’s what we digest. So that sounded like a pretty big remit. And so, with that kind of ambitious charter, I conducted dozens of interviews. I still remember traveling. I was actually in London once and teaching during the day, and then the whole rest of the evening was booked with these calls to try and interview as many people as possible to figure out what was going on.
We kind of refined a set of proposed changes that I thought had a pretty good chance of leading to pretty large cultural overhaul implied by that idea of a DNA change. And I vetted the proposal with several leaders at multiple levels. And it was ambitious. It included changes to processes, as you might expect, but also things like tooling and team structures and leadership behavior as well.
And on the day of the presentation, I flew down to San Jose, to the big Adobe Towers there and took the elevator up to the 14th floor where the big corporate boardroom was. And I remember waiting. I had to wait outside of the boardroom, and it was already a late meeting. It was supposed to start at like 5 p.m. and somebody came out and said, “Hey, they’re running behind.
Can you wait?”
And of course, yeah– I can wait. And eventually, like an hour later, finally the doors opened and they invited me in. And I found out later that what had happened right before I walked into that meeting was that the CEO and the board of directors had been grilling the general manager of the Creative Cloud Business unit about this outage, saying, “What are you going to do about this? This can never happen again. We’ve lost– you know–the stock has tanked, blah, blah, blah.” So they were getting raked over the coals. So I could tell they were exhausted at this point. Right? It was dinner time, essentially. They’d already been in the boardroom for hours. But I kind of soldiered on, like this was my shot, right, to propose these big changes.
And I kind of held out hope that they’d get fired up about them as well, and see, you know, the potential there. Then as I started describing the proposed changes, I recognized pretty quickly that there was not a lot of energy to discuss this type of change. And I remember wrapping up the final slide and the general manager of the business unit, David, said something like, “I expected a clear set of next steps, a get well plan. And you’ve just described rewiring the entire organization. It’s not what I need.
And then he turned to another kind of a newer VP. Another VP in the room, and said, “John, will you work to turn this into something I can actually use?” I was like, “Oh!” Brutal, right? So that was pretty frustrating for me. I’ve told the story a couple times and I’ve mentioned that I went to the airport and wrote a resignation letter like three times and deleted it.
So frustrated that I had been asked to figure out how to change the DNA of the company. And then I present something that I think has a shot of, you know, at least being a starting point for that. And then, “No, no, no, don’t change the DNA of the company. Give us the technical get-well plan.”
So that was really frustrating to me. And I’m curious if you’ve ever been in a situation like this or a similar experience where you thought you were pretty empowered, like had a clear remit, had autonomy to do a thing only to discover you weren’t, or maybe you didn’t have what you needed in order to use the autonomy well, or you ended up feeling like I did. Like the rug was just pulled out from under you a bit.
Sounding familiar to anyone? I think we’ve probably all been in some kind of a similar situation, and so we thought we would use this as a pretty nuanced example of this, because there were things that I really was empowered to do.
I was empowered to make a proposal, but it did not go well. And so we thought we would dig in to this and talk about real empowerment and the tools we wanted to share tonight. So Richard’s going to give us where we would start here, and then he’s going to kind of interview me. We haven’t really talked through how we would use these tools in this situation.
So he’s going to kind of live interview me about how might you think about it through these lenses. So that’s where we’re going to go next.
Richard
Yeah, we’ve started by thinking about what tools we would use proactively and we thought, well, they should work to make sense of a situation where it didn’t work out. So we are testing that live right here with you.
So the first tool we’re going to look at– and when I say “tool” here, I should be clear, we mean a thinking tool. And if you’ve been with us for any length of time in any workshop in the past, you know, we believe pretty strongly that clear thinking leads to better action. And so we’re big on mental models and thinking tools that will help us and especially groups of people think more clearly about a thing.
So the first thing we want to think more clearly about is how authority is shared. Like who actually gets to make a decision? How is a decision going to be made when there’s multiple people involved? And to do that, we’re going to use a tool from Jurgen Appello called The Seven Levels of Delegation. We’ll link to his original article in the show notes.
But here’s a quick overview. When people think about delegation or about sharing authority, they tend to think about three extremes. It’s my decision. It’s your decision. Or we have to agree on the decision. In The Seven Levels of Delegation, those are three of the levels, but they’re not actually the most useful ones. There’s nuance in between that’s much more practical for real world decision making.
So here are the seven levels models from the perspective of the leader sharing power.
- Level one is tell. At level one, it’s my decision. I’ll tell you what I decided, but we’re not really going to discuss it.
- Level two is sell. At level two, it’s still my decision, but I’m going to try to bring you along. I’m going to answer your questions. I’m going to try to create alignment.
- Level three is consult. Now it starts getting interesting. Declaring a decision to be at level three means I’m going to decide, but I’ll consult you and take your input into account before I make a decision. Often in practice this actually feels like deciding together, but with a clear tiebreaker so we don’t get stuck.
- Level four is agree. At level four there’s no decision unless we agree on it. Level four means consensus, which is slow and sometimes leads to no decision at all. We try to avoid level four, except in cases like working agreements where we want everyone to own the agreement.
- Level five is advise. This is the mirror image of level three. Now it’s your decision and I’d like you to seek and consider my advice before making a decision. Again, like level three, level five in practice can feel like deciding together, but now you’re the tiebreaker instead of me.
- Level six is inquire: the mirror image of level two. You decide, but I want to be able to ask questions and be brought along with the decision.
- Then finally, level seven is delegate. It’s totally your decision and I’m giving up the right to expect you to explain the rationale behind the decision.
When it comes to empowering teams and individuals, this model helps us in two ways. First, it gives us shared language to talk about how we’re sharing authority, and it allows us to apply different levels for different kinds of decisions.
Second, it gives leaders a way to think and talk about moving decisions from one level to another. If a decision is currently at, say, level three, I’m deciding with my employees’ advice, but I want to move it to level five, where my employee decides, with my input, I can ask myself what keeps me from making this three into a five.
And that’s where the Humanizing Work Three Jobs of Management model comes in. If I want to move this from a three to a five, what additional clarity do they need? What capability do I need to help increase? What system improvements are needed here? We’ve talked at length about the Three Jobs model in past episodes, so we’ll drop a link to more about the model in the show notes.
So, before we intersect the two things here and talk about how you would use them proactively, Peter, in the scenario that you told us about, what are some focus areas on here that you would have liked more of, in retrospect, to produce a good outcome?
Peter
There are two ways I’m looking at this as a useful way to kind of retrospect over this experience. And the thing that I probably need to clear out of the brain first is how useful this model would have been in that initial conversation with Bryan and say, “Bryan, which boxes should I include in my proposal, here, or are okay?”
Like, do I have the ability to propose changes to strategy? Do I have the ability to propose changes to authority? How we make decisions, how we share power? How about leadership? How about personal growth? Right? How about values? Like are those on the table here? And that might have given him the ability to push back and say, “Well, when I said change the DNA, I really meant to change the technical DNA. And so you really ought to be focused on the lower right somewhere, right?”
Richard
Yeah. So to avoid muddling this with the meta layer there, when you came up with that, what were you doing in terms of this model or what would Bryan have been doing for you if he’d been using the model to do that?
Peter
So that would have been a clear “create clarity” move for me. Like I needed more clarity on what success looked like. I think that the biggest one here is a definition of success. We were not really aligned on that.
Richard
Yeah, like “What does a useful proposal look like here?”
Peter
Yeah.
Richard
What would not be helpful? Like, often going for the negative is useful there.
Peter
Yeah. And it may have been that Bryan actually did think that we should make those changes and the circumstances of getting grilled right before I walked in and like, you know, even if he had pulled me aside for 5 minutes and said, “Hey, here’s what just happened, maybe here’s what we should do instead.” But I really didn’t have much interaction with Bryan.
Like I said, he was pretty radio silence between giving me the assignment and me walking into the room to present it. So…
Richard
That makes me think of a kind of information one or maybe it’s capability in this context, like the ability to get the information you need to make a good proposal.
Peter
Yeah, Yeah, for sure.
Richard
Even if you had clarity about it, you may not have been equipped to do what you needed to do. Like, it sounds like you missed the perspective of some key stakeholders in this.
Peter
Yeah, I think the obvious one is David, the general manager. Again, not for lack of trying, right? But there was something missing—where, if we’re going to change the DNA, but the top leaders don’t have time to talk about that, I’m not really being set up to succeed there, right? So I think of that as a part of information is like how we communicate, how we agree to collaborate on certain things.
Richard
Yeah, interaction may also include things like who can schedule meetings and when, how available are people?
Peter
I mentioned that there’s probably something around strategy I should have known. Where does this fall strategically compared to everything else that’s on your plate? Because I kind of feel like in hindsight it was “That’s something that the engineers can figure out. Just tell us what you’re going to do and we’ll rubberstamp it.” That’s really what he asked that other VP to do–go work with the engineering leaders to figure out the technical solution here to prevent this.
And so it wasn’t as strategically important as I thought it was.
Richard
All right. So we’ve got these two tools. We have The Seven Levels for clarity on how authority is shared. We’ve got the Three Jobs, for things you might focus on as a leader to help your people. How do we put the two together to create real empowerment and not just a wish for empowerment?
Peter
Right. And we’ve been thinking about a way to visualize this because frequently we’ll do this in coaching conversations. We’ll be working with an executive or an executive team and they’ll say, “You know, I really want to empower people to do X, Y, and Z.” And we’ll say, “Well, what’s preventing you from doing that?” And we found that there is kind of a structure that’s emerged in those conversations.
And so that’s what we’re going to visualize and then work through together. And so the structure for that is kind of to think about a) to name the thing. And so I’ll just put something concrete on here. Like I’m thinking of a COO recently that we worked with that wanted to empower people on their team to make M&A decisions without always relying on me to kind of vet or approve.
So you go and to do the research, you go do the right calculations. And at that point, he was saying this takes most of my time– I gotta review these proposals and I go and point out things that they missed. And so then we talk about what level are you at today and where would you like to be?
And so if we just go right over to the seven levels, do you think he was– Richard, do you remember this conversation I was talking about?
Richard
When we asked this leader about it? He said, “Yeah, this is pretty much at a three right now. Three would be, “I’m going to make the decision as the executive, but I’ll get your input to make the decision.”
Peter
And then we asked, “Where do you want it to be?” And he said, “Probably at a five, maybe eventually at a six.” But like the first move, the one that he could see as possible was “Let’s make it a five.” And then we kind of stole an idea from Robert Keegan’s immunity to change map, which he calls the worry box.
So we said, “All right, imagine that you just did five without any other action right now. You just said from now on, you make the decision. Please seek my advice. But you own the decision because a key component of five is I can’t overrule your decision if I don’t like it. You really do own it. You get my advice. If you consider my advice and then still decide to do it, the decision sticks as the key difference between a five and a three. Both of them are conversational.”
So we said, “All right, imagine it’s a five now, and you gave them advice and they bought that company anyway. What would you be worried about? Like they make a bad long term call on an acquisition. That’s an easy one.” And then we say, “Okay, well, what else?” Maybe he’s worried that they don’t have the same access to our board of directors as I do. So they may not know the current strategy as well as I do or the current budget constraints as well as I do. What else would cause you worry if you were to do that?”
Maybe they don’t have as many contacts to find new targets, right? There’s a whole bunch of things we could come in here so it’s like these are all the concerns or worries that I have. If I were to just give them a five; that they’ll make a call that I have to justify due to like our current decision structure.
Richard
Yeah. The comment in the chat that the five might become a 4 or a 3: The number one best way to actually destroy empowerment is to declare something to be a five and then overwrite it when you don’t like the decision. It’s your decision as long as you guess the decision that I want. I see leaders do this all the time. They really want to do the right thing.
They want to share authority, and then something happens that they didn’t expect, and they say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It’s not actually your decision if you make that decision.” And that is exactly the thing we’re trying to avoid here by anticipating those situations and going after them proactively.
Peter
And a big one that I actually remember from this one and from a lot of these other ones: “I don’t have time to train them on this. I’ve been working on this for 20 years. It’s been my career.” Right? “How am I supposed to bring other people up to speed on that in the amount of time it would take to make this future not be 20 years from now? What if I want that to be six months from now?” Right? All right. If we want to go from a three to a five, what focus areas might help us address some of these concerns? Strategy seems like an important one in this particular instance, right? Values. Yeah. All right. So we got a good old stack just from “create clarity.”
Like to a certain extent this is a technical skill, right?
Richard
Yeah, and “technical” in this whatever context you’re in is technical in the domain, like the ability to do the task, not technical in the software, IT kind of sense.
Peter
The two that stood out the most to me in this one are “Can I help increase the technical skills required to do this job well?” And the partnering part was particularly big to address. They don’t have as many contacts to find new targets and improve the system that you can imagine this executive saying, “Hey, if I were to focus on that, that would help me move from a three to a five. Yeah, career development is an important one.
Yeah, safety’s an important one there. Like if I make a bad call on my out, if I recommend something you wouldn’t, is that going to be bad for me. Right? And then we would probably work with the person that was wanting to empower their folks a little bit more here– out of all of these, where would you start if you could guarantee moving the needle on one of these?
Which one is high leverage? Right? What if you could do that thing, it would make all the other ones easier,” is one way to think about this and I’m trying to remember what he actually did. I think the one that he focused on the most was technical skills and definition of success. I think he felt like, “Yeah, if we could get a real clear definition of what a good merger target looks like, how we make those decisions and then develop the skills to do that well, then I think we’re in good shape and then we can proceed to kind of work through these and say, ‘What am I going to do in the next 3 to 6 months to help increase technical skills?” And it was, you know, “I’m going to work with so-and-so to share how I thought through the last three M&A events.” Right? And both for and against, right? Ones where we pursued one and decided not to, or ones where we actually did acquire for definition of success. And I do remember this– is that they were going to start building out a set of heuristics to guide M&A activities.
And now this is turned from you know, “I’m really worried.” I wish to–in order to get from a three to a five, these are the actions I can take now. I can plan those out. I can have this conversation with the employee or the team to where a) we’re really transparent, that this is where it is today.
I’m transparent about wanting to be here at a five, so I want to move from a three to a five. These are the areas that I as a leader or as a manager could work on in order to feel more confident in that. And here are the actions I plan to take.
Richard
And it remains a three while you take those actions, which is the way you avoid that kind of delegation theater like “It’s yours as long as you decide correctly, we’re clear on it’s still ultimately mine, but I’m trying to make that lighter and lighter and more of a rubber stamp and less of an active participant in the decision as I increase your capability.”
And then at some point the actual authority moves.
Peter
Richard, let’s work through one other example. But instead of us trying to remember one, let’s work through one that’s a little more current for you. You run a little side business, building out software. You are the founder/owner of that company. You have people that work for you in that company. I wonder if any examples come to mind and we can just work through the same model.
Richard
Yeah, I have one person doing most of the development for it these days because I’m too busy to. He’s fairly empowered for making technical and product kind of decisions and we had one recently where we’re changing the billing model in our product in a big way, which required a lot of tricky code in different places and changes to the website and all sorts of different things all at once.
So I’m in this situation as kind of the key business stakeholder and kind of product owner here. And I also have some technical expertise. It’s a startup, so we don’t have like super clear Scrum roles—we’re all kind of doing a little bit of all of it. So yeah, that’s the situation. I have a tricky technical and product task that I would like to have a little less of my hands in, because I’m mostly working in this company.
Peter
All right, so what’s the scenario where you have wished to empower more, recently?
Richard
Yeah, I’d like, “decide the actual technical implementation of this billing change.” It’s like instead of signing up for your team, you’re now paying per user more like Slack or Trello or something like that. That’s a pretty big change to the system that we’re using for that. And I wanted him to really own that and not have to micromanage technical decisions in there.
Peter
Where is it today on the seven levels?
Richard
When we first started it was at a three for anything of consequence. I didn’t really want it to be, but it was.
Peter
Where did you want it to be?
Richard
I wanted it to be a six.
Peter
Let’s go through the exercise.
Richard
Okay. So I was worried about billing mistakes, like not charging somebody or charging them too much. I was worried about a tech decision that gets us in trouble later.
Peter
Are you talking about painting corners architecturally?
Richard
Yeah. Yeah. Choosing something that we end up regretting later and not very much later when I want to add a second tier or something and you can have your regular plan and your pro plan. And it turns out we’ve hard coded that there can only be one or something like that in a way that’s painful later.
And I don’t mean like a cutting corners kind of tech debt, that sort of situation, because he had proven that he could do good work from that perspective and was using TDD and I wasn’t worried about code quality. I was worried more about design decisions there.
Peter
So anything else come to mind?
Richard
Let’s see. This is not exactly a worry about shifting it. This is a worry about not shifting it. So that probably doesn’t go there, does it?
Peter
If you’re worried about it, if it comes to mind, put it there and we can ignore it later. But let’s get it out of our heads.
Richard
As it was kind of like the reason I wanted to delegate it is that I could see myself becoming a bottleneck for making decisions. And so like that really goes up at the top. Yeah, that’s it’s…
Peter
Really.
Richard
Do this because, yeah, I want to fix this. Good. Right.
Peter
Let’s go over to the Three Jobs model and explore some of the three jobs that might help you feel more comfortable about moving from a three to a six?
Richard
The technical skills is one that immediately became a thing. Definition of success turned out to be more of a thing than I expected. As somebody who teaches product management skills, I should have expected this, I think I assumed more alignment around what success looks like from the customer and business perspective than we actually had.
So that one did pop up, but technical skills was a big one. I turned out to know a whole lot more about the technologies involved in this. I’ve done more rails apps over the years. I’ve worked with Stripe more–stuff like that. There is an information one that we have not been able to solve, but that I was trying to, as part of this, which is better information about some of the libraries that we’re using and getting support on those things.
We were using a third party billing library and it’s been really hard to get information about some of how those things work. [Got it.] So those are the three main things that I needed to work on to make this happen. There was probably actually we should grab safety as well because we bounce off that several times too, because billing things feel unsafe. And that I think led to some analysis paralysis.
Peter
And it’s a good clarification of the safety one, which is that (and Richard, I might even propose one other one here) is make it safe for people to explore, connect and execute, which we often think of as psychological safety. But it can also be other types of safety. And it makes me wonder if protecting like protecting from future lawsuits or from a big tax bill down the line or protecting the organization from future threats might be related to that a little bit.
Richard
Could be. We were experiencing it more as a kind of psychological safety here, like safety to make changes in the code and not be afraid to move forward on something.
Peter
Okay. If you could only guarantee moving the needle on one of these, which one would you pick?
Richard
Definition of success.
Peter
Okay, so start there.
Richard
That was actually the question I asked myself. I don’t have much time. If I could guarantee one of these, which one? And it was that one. And so it was the way I did this was give more examples of positive and negative outcomes here. Not as granular as like BDD scenarios, but more of “Here’s what I imagine it looking like once we’re successful, this sort of thing happens.
Here are some things we’re trying to avoid.” And so just telling stories about how this should work.
Peter
I’ve lost track a little bit about where we are in the timeline of this story. Is this is a done decision? Is this something that’s already happened?
Richard
Yeah. That actually already happened. That was my first move. We are kind of one technical fix away from being done with this at this point.
Peter
Okay. Did you end up doing anything else related to these other ones?
Richard
Yes. So for technical skills, I ended up pairing on a few thin slices of this. Some of that was a little bit like a spike. Like, let’s just make sure we can move data from one spot to another and walk through how I think about that. And so we actually did that. There was a little bit about safety where we talked through things that could go wrong and did some things like discovering, you know, we don’t have enough customers right now.
We can temporarily switch Stripe back to test mode– because for some insane reason you can’t have it in both states at once. Like once you go to production, everything you test is in production from now until forever with Stripe, which is a very interesting decision. So we figured out we don’t have enough customers yet to worry about that, and we know when they bill.
So we can toggle test mode on and off and make it much safer to try things. And some of that was also reminding my developer on the psychological end of, like we have a good suite of tests and you’re writing more of them and we’re going to keep doing that. We have source control, we can rollback mistakes.
There’s a pretty high level of safety here to just try stuff and find something that works.
Peter
Okay, I’m curious if in the pairing you dug into the availability of information at all. I could see that potentially coming up.
Richard
There was a little bit of that in me thinking out loud, and here’s how I would go answer that question about this thing that we don’t understand. And so they’re just definitely increased information there.
Peter
And would you say at this point you’re at a six?
Richard
No, I am mostly– it’s still a three, but it’s a very light three now, which is a really common progression I see; which is I mostly don’t encounter things where I would have to make a different decision than he would, but it’s sort of three as a safety net and largely for him, I think we keep coming back to, yeah, that’s a good decision, go with it.
So it’s like almost a five, but it’s not really because I’m still being asked for the final decision on a few things.
Peter
So what do you think would have to change to flip it from a three to a five?
Richard
To flip it from a three to a five might just require deciding to do it. I’m sort of realizing as we talk about it, that I’ve done all the things in the middle that I haven’t actually made it the authority change official. We just kind of drifted into more capability, but no more actual empowerment, which is interesting.
I don’t think it’s a four. And the reason why is that when I’m asked to weigh in on something and I make a call, if that call is different from his, we still move forward with mine. So we’re not blocked on trying to get consensus. So he’ll say, “That’s not the way I would do it, but okay.” That’s a three and this is why four is so undesirable, by the way. You generally want to avoid it because every person has veto power in a four level decision. Anybody doesn’t like the decision, you’re paused until everybody likes the decision. So for things like agreeing to a Sprint backlog or adopting a working agreement or something like that, that makes sense. But most things are better at a three or five than a four. Somebody can break the tie.
Peter
So I wanted to dig into that a little bit because I think many leaders find themselves in this exact scenario. I did the work, to actually empower my team. They have greater capability now. They have greater clarity. The systems are working now, but we still haven’t flipped it. And I think often, no matter how much work we do, there is still a “All right. I gotta pull the ripcord here and let them go and you’re going to own it now.” And I think that’s a little bit scary for a leader, especially because the stakes are high for you in this case. Right. All these worries, if any of those worries actually happen, it would be really bad for the business.
And so at some point, I think no matter what we do procedurally here, no matter how logically we’ve thought through it, there’s still an emotional shift that needs to happen where I just– I’m just going to go for it. I need to now trust.
Richard
And then maybe this is a good time to revisit the worry box and say at this point, after all the work we’ve done, what is at risk now? And maybe there’s something else that we’ve uncovered. I actually don’t think there is in this particular case, but I’ve seen some where we’ve solved those things. But some new thing has popped up. [Yeah] But in this case, I don’t think it’s anything real. I think it’s just inertia. And at some point we actually have to make the change explicit.
Peter
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Richard
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Peter
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