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Which are the key ingredients to be an _autonomous team_? I would love to hear from you 🧡 Here are my thoughts 👇
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The teams I worked with that had the most autonomy had the next three key points. 1. Trust/Psychological Safety 2. Knowledge and Tools 3. Direction and Vision When some of those ingredients aren't in place, the autonomy is heavily affected.
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Trust/Psychological Safety You need to be trusted within your organization to achieve your goals. You need to be in a safe space to share when you fail. Two cultural factors here I found some correlation: - Feedback Culture - Experimentation Culture
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Knowledge and Tools Your autonomy suffers a lot if you don't have the knowledge and tooling to accomplish the goal. Here I found that leadership needs to focus on providing you the knowledge and tooling via: - Mentoring/Coaching - Training programs This is the easier to fix!
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Direction and Vision This one needs to be provided by your leaders. Vision cannot be delegated. It needs to be shared and understood by the team members.
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If your leaders don't provide you a problem, and a mission. You cannot be autonomous. Where are we going? Which are the customers? Why do we do this? Which is the business model? You don't know where to go. Which autonomy do you have to solve a problem that's not defined?
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This point is the hardest to solve because you fully depend on your leaders to provide that direction and mission. What worked for me has been: - Do Workshops to build that vision and purpose. - Bring the stakeholder closer and ask _Why do we do what we do_?
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Move from delivering stuff (feature teams/mercenaries) to delighting the customers (product teams/missionaries) Share with them why it's important to focus on the purpose rather than the execution-only If you show that you can understand the business, it will bring you autonomy
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When you have the direction, follow it! And if you think you might need to change direction, inform it! Debate with the team and commit together to the new direction If leadership gives you a direction, but they feel you're not following it, this will also affect your autonomy!
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There is a lot more stuff to take into account! Like coupling, big organizations, OKRs, ... the bigger the organization is, it reduces your autonomy. And it's normal! The three points I shared are the key foundations to having the highest autonomy possible in your context IMHO
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They informed me by earpiece that I might be referring to Empowered Teams and not Autonomous Teams. cc: @gauchocardoso