The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership (Empowered Teams)

by Christina Wodtke

If someone says, “Speak your mind,” I’ll ask: What does it look like when someone “speaks their mind”? Why does that rule matter? How can we tell if people aren’t following the rule? How do you plan to call each other out if someone violates this rule?

“High-context cultures are those in which the rules of communication are primarily transmitted through the use of contextual elements (i.e., body language, a person’s status, and tone of voice) and are not explicitly stated. This is in direct contrast to low-context cultures, in which information is communicated primarily through language and rules are explicitly spelled out.” Study.com. Accessed December 2, 2018. https://study.com/academy/lesson/high-context-culture-definition-examples-quiz.html.

When I put it that way it sounds ridiculous, but many people act as if that were the case. They spend a ton of time finding that perfect hire, but no time coaching them. They set goals, but don’t check them weekly. They set norms, then forget them as the team slides into old habits (and arguments). You need check-ins, so the team can live their intentions. The cadence here is weekly: the weekly one-on-one, weekly status email, Monday commitment meetings and Friday brag sessions, weekly retrospectives. These rituals are where the team starts to learn how to hold each other accountable, how to question each other’s decisions, and how to work together toward a shared goal.

Psychological safety is when you know you won’t be ripped a new one for asking a question. It’s when your boss thanks you when you point out she made a mistake. Psychological safety is when your coworker gives you advice and you know they want to help you, and not put you down. It seems like it should be the norm, but sadly it is not.

Reframe failure. As Astro Teller of Google X says, “I’m not pro-failure. I’m pro-learning.” Show situational humility. Don’t be the one with all the answers. Be willing to say, “I don’t know.” Admit when you are wrong. Listen completely and ask good questions. Nothing says “I care” more than listening. Compliment, offer help, brainstorm solutions. Be the person who makes answers happen, not the person who has answers. Sanction clear violations. If someone has broken the norms the team agreed upon, model effective feedback. Let them know what they’ve done is inappropriate quickly and clearly.

The difference between guilt and shame is you feel guilt when you do a bad thing, and shame when you are convinced you are a bad person.

In my life, I’ve been a manager, a coach, and a teacher. You could argue they are all variations of management. All three share a common misconception, which is that the job is to tell people things—what to do, what to think, or what to know. But it’s not. If you want to be good at any of these, you have to become a facilitator in another human’s journey to self-management.

A coach who tells you how to solve your problems is giving you a one-size-fits-all answer, creating dependency if the advice works, and blowing up in your face when it’s wrong. But a coach who pushes you to closely examine your situation and develop your own solutions is a great coach.

A boss who tells you what to do is a micromanager. As well as annoying the subordinate, a boss like that doesn’t scale. No CEO has the time to tell their direct reports what to do in every situation, much less all their employees.

A manager has to learn to create a workplace where all employees feel comfortable both making decisions alone and asking for advice when it’s needed. The one-on-one is where that habit is built.

Try not to have more than one to three things on your list. Just one is best. Remember, you meet every week. Discuss fewer things better.

Step One: Now You’re Ready to Coach G is for Goals. Ask your report, “What would you like to get out of today’s meeting?” Let their topic lead the discussion.

R is for Reality (or Reflection). Ask questions about the topic they are struggling with: What facts do they have? What insights? What hunches? What is their reality?

Some questions to try out from Coaching Mastery14: What’s your gut tell you? How’s that make you feel? What’s exciting? What’s scary? What’s making you [sad, angry, happy]? How does your culture or history affect this? What do you know? (Can be used...

O is for Options. Have the report come up with their own solutio...

“Do you have any ideas for what to do about this?” More possible questions to ask: How can you make your dream happen? What’s possible? What if you had a magic wand, and what you wanted just happened? What’s a new way? What if there were no barriers? What’s the ideal?

W is for Wrap-Up. If you have gotten through the issues you need to, you can discuss next steps, e.g., “Let me know how it goes,” “Email me that report,” or “Looking forward to learning more next week!” Ask, “How can I help?” Then you can restart the cycle or finish the conversation.

Wrap-Up questions: How can I help? What resources are avai...

Compassion is empathy with an action item.

the four I’s as a model for structuring feedback.

Information—what is the behavior I observed that is not working for me? Importance—why is it problematic? Invitation to change—a nice way to say, “I’d like you to cut that out.” Implications—if you don’t, these are the results I expect will happen, from not being able to work together to firing.

The only thing you can both be sure about is behavior. Talk about that, share your reactions, inquire about intention.

Stay with what you both know: This happened. There are four strong ways you can stay with what you know, but still offer clear feedback:

Tell them how the behavior affected you. This we’ve discussed. Tell them the behavior is not meeting their apparent goals. In the fable portion of this book, Mick wants Kendra to work faster. Allie has to point out this has the opposite effect. Your behavior may meet your goals, but it is costly to you. For example, being so persistent in pushing your agenda that another person might dig in out of sheer annoyance. The pushy individual may get a poor reputation and find it hard to accomplish goals that take cooperation. Ask, “In what ways am I part of the problem?” Perhaps Kendra could say, “Mick, I know I deliver late a lot, and I really want to fix this. But when you hover over my cube, I can’t focus, and it takes me longer to do my work. Can we find a way to make you more comfortable so I can settle down and focus?” Hopefully Mick and Kendra could find a way to find a balance, perhaps via short daily check-ins.

What if You Aren’t the Boss? It can be tough when your boss isn’t the best coach. But you can still coach upward. Ask your manager what she wants to cover or suggest a topic, then ask her what she knows about the reality of the matter, share wh...

look for peer-to-peer coaching. You can read a book like Inner Game of Stress with a small group of coworkers and discuss it after. Then coach each other, using the GROW model. Question-based coaching with GROW allows you to coach anyone, even if you don’t have expertise in that area. That means a designer can coach an engineer or a...

If you do have advice, ask for consent first. Try saying something like, “I have an idea I think might help. May I share?” That little gesture of respect prevents you from appearing bossy and makes space for your report to hear what you have to say.

This is what i need to do more than anything - Ask for permission to give advice

The combination of deep listening, directed questioning, and respectful and restrained advice changes the power dynamic in the employer-employee relationship. It becomes a partnership in which each person has a distinct role to play and in which both are responsible for each other’s success. Which they are.

This model is so effective I’ve been using it in my office hours with my Stanford students. When a student comes by, I ask them what’s on their mind. I ask them what they know about the situation, and if they had thought of any solutions already. I offer advice when I have it and when th...

I’m a fan of two columns: keeps and changes. The keeps + and changes Δ columns used on retrospective. It’s good to go with an approach that matches your team culture. Personally, I prefer the very simple one, because I think it’s more important to do regular, small, fast check-ins than make a production out of it. If every week you just improve one to three things, that adds up very quickly to a great team. A lightweight ritual is less likely to be skipped because you are low on time. It can take just ten minutes, tacked on the end of another meeting.

The team’s leader can make a big difference in how willing the team is to admit mistakes and learn from them. From Edmondson, The Fearless Organization

one surgeon team leader repeatedly told his team: “I need to hear from you because I’m likely to miss things.” “The repetition of this phrase was as important as its meaning: People tend not to hear or not to believe a message that contradicts old norms when they hear it only once. Soliciting feedback suggests to others that their opinion is respected; it may also contribute to establishing a norm of active participation.”

In early retrospectives, expect to go first, admitting a mistake of your own. You can also “seed” the retrospective by keeping an ear to the ground for good items for reflection, and say things like, “You folks really figured it out. I hope you’ll mention it Friday at retro so others can learn from it.” Or “You really struggled with that. Would you mind bringing it up Friday so we can figure out how it doesn’t happen again?” But nothing beats being willing to go first.

Your reception to mistakes will make a huge difference to the team’s psychological safety. Treat them as failed experiments that reveal new potential solutions. You don’t have to condone incompetence, but a well-intentioned, well-researched, well-executed...

The motto of product-design firm IDEO is, “Fail often, so you’ll succeed sooner.” Innovation is hard, and if you really want it you’ll have to make a safe place for risk taking.

learning team creates a rhythm of introspection and evaluation. Some do it at the end of each project, some will make a simple “keeps” and “changes” tally each week. What matters is the learning cycle. (I recommend both, by the way.)

15 Agile is a time boxed, iterative approach to software delivery that builds software incrementally from the start of the project, instead of trying to deliver it all at once near the end. It has a number of best practices (rituals) for delivering software iteratively, and both my OKR and team methodologies borrow from the practices I’ve seen succeed.

Google has always had an approach of hire smart people, give them a goal, and leave them alone to accomplish it.

If you rely on OKR results to guide your decisions, you will encourage sandbagging and punish your biggest dreamers. Reward what people do, not how good they are at working the system.

Team feedback has two parts: the group level and the member level. A team has to look at each member and their contributions AND how the individuals come together and work as a unit. If you only give individual feedback and never examine group dynamics, you’ve only got half the puzzle.

“Are we talking about the same product when we sit in that conference room? Do we know what our roles are? Are we getting closer or further away from our goals and a clear understanding of what we came here to do?” — Noam Zomerfeld

I recommend the marvelous Thanks for the Feedback by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone.

Some things can be discussed in a one-on-one. Some things can be addressed as a team. And some things just aren’t worth addressing. None of us are perfect, and it’s not a manager’s job to try to make us so. As a manager, you are seeking problems that interfere with the team health and ability to perform.

What is the right frame of mind? You are here to help. You work for the team. In service to the team, you are going to help this person be the best teammate they can be. You’re going to celebrate their strengths! You’re going to coach their weaknesses. You’re going to be there for them.

You need to listen so you can react authentically and appropriately to the other person. Your goal is not to tell them what’s wrong or right, but to point out problems in their contributions to the team, understand how they see the situation, and invite them to come up with solutions to fix the issue. Understanding takes listening.

One person was wounded by the feedback he got, and I shared Chapter 10 from Thanks for the Feedback (marvelous book!) with the team. I now suggest assigning this chapter BEFORE the feedback sessions (perhaps even before your quarterly reviews) because it is so powerful in helping create psychological safety.

It’s vital to decide which feedback to accept and which to discard. Learning that not all feedback has to be acted on may be the most valuable information I have ever gotten, and I was happy to share it out. Here are two quotes, as Thanks for the Feedback quotes Anne Lamott:

. . Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one. And as long as you don’t hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard, that’s what you get to do with it. There’s a fence around your acre, though, with a gate, and if people keep coming onto your land and sliming it or trying to do what they think is right, you get to ask them to leave. And they have to go, because this is your acre.21’

Feedback is anecdata. Sometimes it tells you something about you, sometimes it tells you something about the other person, and sometimes it tells you something about the interpersonal dynamic. Listen thoughtfully and choose strategically what you do with that information.

Keep asking for input and live with long uncomfortable silences until you get it. Repeat phrases like, “You have to share what doesn’t work, so we can get better.” When you are tired of saying it, they are starting to hear it.