Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,and trust them to get the job done.
Think for a moment about Indian Cricket team, India won “One day International Cricket World Cup” twice – in 1983 under the captaincy of Kapil Dev and in 2011 following the captaincy of Mahendra Singh Dhoni. I bet no one told these winning teams: “To start practicing at a certain time of the day or to play shots using only a specific technique or focus on only an area”. The very idea is absurd.
In-fact, they were all
motivated bunch of individuals and had freedom to execute the job in hand with
utmost precision with autonomy. They truly represent a self-organizing team.
Leaders, captain, support staff and sponsors played a vital role in building the environment for winning team. Whether you’re fixing a car, learning to ride a bicycle or launching a satellite, Autonomy plays a vital role for all of us. Autonomy, Mastery and Trust explained by Daniel H. Pink, author of the book “Drive; the surprising truth about what motivates us” is closely knitted to Agile principles.
The 5th Agile Principle is for leaders who must bring following attributes to the project environment:
- Be available and approachable to resolve day to day impediments and celebrate success along with team.
- Bring transparency in budgets, timelines, project road map and make it accessible for everyone visually.
- Encourage culture of continuous constructive feedback, cheer conversations, advertise courage and care.
- Develop deep understanding of business goals and objectives among teams and this "Shared understanding” ensure that teams heads in the same direction of common goals.
- Provide tools and resources to boost team effectiveness.
Accountability during autonomy
For leaders, it is vital to not lose focus on element of
accountability when we entrust team with autonomy. Per Motivation 2.0 “people
by-pass responsibility when they have autonomy”, however Motivation 3.0 presume
that people want to be accountable. Explained by Daniel H. Pink, author
of the book “Drives”.
Too much freedom may result in chaos and it is a space leaders
must avoid, and it is a continuous uphill struggle to strike a perfect balance
especially in complex project environment, where execution of tasks by
autonomous teams is challenged by the need to coordinate and align work with
multiple experts, sponsors and other units in the organization.
Let’s look at three frameworks which provides appropriate
eco-system to maintain autonomy among teams, we they all stick around together and utilizes the true power of Autonomy.
The 5th Agile Principle “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
1. With-in Scrum framework, values of Commitment, Courage, Focus, Openness and Respect are catalyst to the Agile delivery model and bringing Autonomy, Mastery and Trust in complex project environments. The agile ceremonies especially Retrospective and Sprint Planning keeps up the morale and trust with-in the team.
2. In LeSS (Larg Scale Scrum), the problem of potential chaos by many autonomous teams is solved by having several teams work on the same backlog and avoid creation of multiple self-organizing teams.
3. In SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), Business Owners create a boundary to the autonomy of the teams by determining the goals of product development and the event PI planning sets the right tone for team, everyone is involved in planning sessions not just Managers and Architects and sense of ownership is created.
Agile coaches and Scrum masters must be careful and understand the needs of different individuals on the team to create environment of creativity and high performance.
They can help team aligned to common goals by maintaining the required degree of autonomy and thus meeting the Agile 5th Principle.
