Empower Your Team with Strategic Lenses
Observation: empowering teams to make important decisions is hard to sustain.
And yet. Without making it work, a company will be bottle-necked by it’s leaders’ time and imagination. The company will struggle to retain creative & innovative staff.
The Empowerment Vicious Cycle
There is a vicious cycle of empowerment and disempowerment that happens between company leaders and the product leaders for their teams. It goes something like this:
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First: the realization
A leader, often a founder, realizes they can’t make all the decisions, because that does not scale, and it will hold the company back.
They realize they are becoming a bottleneck, and it will only get worse. They realize they will destroy themself if they try to do it all. They realize they have bigger problems to focus on, that aren’t getting appropriate attention.
They think: “I have to step back from these smaller things to focus on something else”
Second: attempted empowerment
The founder tries to empower Product leaders beneath them to make decisions on their own.
“You need to own this.” They may say.
Third: struggle
It doesn’t go well.
The founder struggles to find balance between micromanagement of decisions, and over-empowerment of decisions.
“I' don’t know what they are doing” they may say.
“No, do this instead” they may say.
Fourth: Give Up On Empowerment
Give up on empowerment, and make the decision yourself.
“They are just not capable”
“We don’t have time for these slow/bad decisions”
Fifth: Repeat
At some point it all begins again.
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The common thread for this cycle is that empowerment is given and expectations are raised, but the tools to make good decisions fast are not provided or taught.
It is difficult to make decisions that are pre-aligned with the intentions of company leaders. It is impossible without guidance.
Good product teams are always identifying new opportunities and paths to achieve them through continuous feedback - from existing customers, prospects, the market, adjacent markets and more.
How does a product team choose which to pursue?
Just ask leadership
One dysfunction is that the team may constantly ask leadership what to do.
This defeats the purpose of empowerment - scaled good decision-making.
The leadership is still making the calls, and every time they do, they reinforce that they must make the calls.
Make a decision in a vacuum and go
Another, equally dysfunctional approach is the product team makes choices and moves on, hoping that it is aligned but not really sure.
Months later, leadership finds out about the choice, and may realize it was dramatically off-course and put a stop to it.
Morale of the team takes a hit and leaves a scar, where the product team is incentivized to always ask the leader early. Which again, reinforces that the leader must always make the calls.
Both of these lead the step 3/struggle, and step 4/give up on empowerment.
Breaking the Cycle
Breaking this cycle requires intentional communication of a framework of ideas, reasons, and structures that are tools to make good decisions at scale. In the hands of product teams, it enables those teams to make decisions that are pre-aligned with the intentions of leadership.
I’ll call these structures Lenses.
Lenses
There is an analogy here around lenses that someone can look through to make sense of something in a new way.
Spoiler alert - I am about to reveal something from the movie National Treasure, so if you don’t want to see it, skip past the youtube video below.
In the movie National Treasure, Nicolas Cage finds a pair of glasses that were made by Benjamin Franklin and hidden in the wall of Independence Hall.
The glasses have multiple lenses that can be moved back and forth to alter what you see through the glasses.
Only by wearing the glasses, and applying a specific set of lenses on each side can you see a secret message on the back of the Declaration of Independence.
With the glasses the hero is able to determine where to focus next in order to reach the hidden treasure.
National Treasure - Benjamin Franklin Glasses
Why this is a useful analogy
The thing about lenses, is you can look through them at things and it changes the way you perceive what you are seeing.
So how does this analogy apply to scaling decision-making, and empowering teams?
Let’s think about the outcome we are looking for: scaled good decision-making across all levels of leadership.
Scaled Good Decision-Making
We want teams to be able to make great decisions for the company quickly.
5 times a day, a great decision for the company by every person thinking about which opportunities to pursue. Continuous evaluation of the viability, value, usability, and feasibility of the possible solutions that achieve the opportunity.
The goal is NOT for product team members to make the SAME decision as leadership would have in their place.
The goal is for product team members to make BETTER decisions than leadership would have made in their place. They can only do that with a deep understanding of the core principles and guidelines that leaders are using to make decisions AND they must have bounded autonomy to make decisions using the same framework.
What creates sustainable empowerment is providing tools for making good decisions to our teams. Lenses that help them a look at opportunities and solutions.
The lenses analogy is useful, because it helps us understand that these are tools we are putting in the hands of others, for them to use. Do our teams understand how to use them? Have we shown them how they can be used, and what they are for? Have we made them usable?
If our teams can’t understand the tools, don’t know how to use them, or how they were created, then they are of zero value. Don’t give someone a tool they don’t understand.
Strategic Lenses
Leadership needs to do more than say the team is empowered, and wait for results. Leadership needs to do more check their work.
Leadership needs to continuously craft a set of strategic lenses that their product team leaders can use to look at the opportunities and solutions in front of them and make the best choice, with only rare participation of leadership.
There are a litany of lenses that are possible. They can be grouped into a few core types, namely: missions, visions, strategies, context, and time-centric goals.
Missions
Why is does a company exist? What is its mission? Why does a product exist? What is its mission? Why does a platform exist? What is its mission?
If there is an opportunity that is available, and it does not align with the mission, then either the mission should be reconsidered because the opportunity is so great, OR it’s not something to focus on right now. Usually the latter.
Visions
What does the future look like, if we achieve our mission? What is our vision of the world, from the eyes of our users and customers deep in the future? What are the things they can do to solve their problems that they can’t do today?
A vision is not a list of features that have been built. It is a picture of the future: e.g. a runner can make appointments, check their schedule, all without stopping their run, even for a minute.
Strategies
What is our strategy to achieve the mission or vision? How do we intend to accomplish it? Why do we intend to accomplish it that way?
A strategy is not a list of features. It is a list of tenets that help identify which opportunities and features might benefit the user, customer, and company based on our macro-decisions about how to achieve our vision.
Context
What is happening in the market, in our company, with our technology, with our partners, and why does that matter?
COVID 19 is a good example, it changed the world. The way that customers, markets, and users behave changed dramatically. Without this context, it would be very hard to make good decisions.
Goals
Where are we focusing now? What are the things we are focusing on this year, that help achieve the mission, vision, strategy?
Again, goals are not a list of features, but a series of outcomes we want to achieve in a specific timeframe.
To be clear, there are many kinds of lenses you provide to your teams, they can be product-centered, company-centered, technology-centered, and so on.
Creating lenses it the responsibility of leadership, but that is not all…
Lens Maintenance
Once the lenses are created, that is not enough.
The role of leadership is to create the lens, reinforce its use, teach their teams how to use it, and change them when needed.
Creation
Lens creation is the practice of self-discovery and asking why. There is some reason that a leader is making a decision - what is the underlying reason or reasons?
Once these reasons are extracted, it’s important to write them down, and then refine them with other peer leaders so that the entire leadership team is on the same page about whatever the lens is - mission, strategy, goals, etc.
The most important part is the deep WHY behind the principles. That makes the lens usable, it makes it actionable.
Teaching
It’s not enough to provide a document, examples must be given, deep conversations must be had. Every person should get the opportunity to hear. In time, each decision-maker should be able to teach others about each lens with the same level of understanding as the leadership who created it.
One suggestion: use the “I do”, “We do”, “You do” approach to decision making.
Bring your product leaders into a decision that you make, explain to them why you are making it, and how you worked through it. Next time, put them in the driver seat to make the decision, and have them walk you through their decision-making process. Suggest other things to think about - things they have not considered - that will upgrade their decision-making engine. Finally, have them make decisions without you, and review them on a regular basis to give feedback.
In time, you will find you have limited feedback, and may even start to see them coming up with things you had not thought of.
Reinforcement
The principles within the lenses must be present and repeated often. In annual kickoffs, they should be repeated. “This is why we are here”. “Our key differentiators are these, and this is why”. “This is where we are focused this year, and this is why”.
In reviews with teams, they should be used to evaluate the work of the teams and said out loud. “This is great, because it ties into our annual goals in ways you may not have realized”. “This work seems misaligned with our mission, because of xyz. Help me understand how you see it connecting to where we are trying to go”.
In short, they should permeate the conversations that teams have with leadership and leadership has with teams.
Change
Lenses change, albeit infrequently.
Even company missions can change, although that is most common with early stage startups.
Leaders must listen to their teams, which will bump up against the boundaries of the lenses and ask questions about why they must stay within the bounds.
In some cases, they will identify opportunities too good to pass up, that warrant changing the lens. An alternate strategy that no one knew was possible. A shift in a team mission that would make them able to support the company strategy more effectively.
Summary
The key takeaway is that empowerment is not sustainable without good lenses in the hands of teams. Leaders must create the lenses, teach their teams how to use them, reinforce their use, and refine them whenever needed.
With time, great lenses drive great scaled decision-making, because decision-makers know that decisions are pre-aligned with the direction established by leadership.
The result is a virtuous cycle of empowerment, alignment, communication, trust, confidence, and innovation that builds on itself and creates momentum.
