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Empower - an action; not a command

You have not empowered a person by telling them "you are empowered."  This is a classic mistake in communication.  When one does this, they misinterpret their message, "I'm empowering you..." with the action that a verb such as empowerment requires to happen.  This person is taking a short cut, by giving the platitude of empowerment in place of any action that would be view by the other as empowering.

"When told that they are empowered to do something; this message is actually interrupted to dis-empower the persons agency."
How does this misinterpretation occur?  Why do we humans mess up this simple act of communication?

Let's look at an example:

For a few months I had been working with a new team of software developers at a large organization.  Like many organizations they had already done the agile/scrum thing and it didn't work for them.  Recently the leadership had built a satellite office and started from a very small pool of tenured people to grow it's new "resource" of technical people.  This time the leadership decided that hiring some experienced people that had "done Agile" and "knew how to Scrum" might give them the needed energy to actually get somewhere with the initiative.  At least these experts could teach the new people how to do agile right.  I guess I was one of these "experts" (another term for a has-been drip under pressure).

Observing the new team for a few weeks I noticed they referred to their process by the label "kanban," yet they never appeared to move any sticky notes on their board, never made new ones or retired any old stickies.  Mostly they just pointed at them and talked about something not written on the note.  It was very difficult for the outsider (me) to follow the process they were using -- or maybe they were not using any process; and I was following them -- to nowhere.  This will take a bit more observation.

Although that was several months ago, and my memory is not the best at recovering details when there is no emotion overlaying the details, believe me there was little emotion at their stand up meetings, I'd call them boring (the meetings, not the people).  I don't remember in the 4 weeks I was observing that they ever shipped any software, never spoke about a customer visit, or discussing a solution with a customer - I don't think anything they talked about ever got done.

So, I some how convinced their manager that what they were calling a process, could not be named - and that wasn't a good thing (sorry Alexander that attribute is not the same as your "quality without a name" ).  It didn't reflect any known process.  He didn't know much about the process either.  It was labeled "kanban." Yet they didn't exhibit any of the behaviors of a team practicing the Kanban process, they didn't even know what steps the process might involve.  They had also tried scrum, but "it didn't work" either.  It was very difficult to discuss these failures with the team or the manager, they were reluctant to discuss what about the process had failed, nor what actions they implemented when these failures occurred.

I made a bold assumption - they didn't know anything about the processes they were espousing they were using.  They had been to training classes, therefore they knew ... something.  They could use the new lexicon in a sentence (90% of the time the sentences made sense).  But how do you tell someone they are ignorant (with the full meaning - that they no nothing about a subject and it's not their fault for having never been exposed properly to the knowledge).  That's a crucial conversation.  I rarely handle these well - I got lucky this time perhaps.  I suggested the team join me in a workshop to talk about the practices they are using and how these map to the Agile Manifesto.  We did this exercise and branched off into many valuable conversations.  During this exercise we decided they were already being Agile, so many of their practices supported the principles of the manifesto.  So the question was not if they were Agile, but how much was enough... could they improve their agility - did they want to try something different?  Along the way of this conversation we might have arrived at an understanding of a difference of opinion, when I used words in the lexicon I had intended to imply certain meanings that they did not intend when they used the words.  We often seemed to use similar phrases but rarely meant the same things actually happened.  That level of miscommunication can be tedious to overcome, while still keeping an open mind that the other person has something valuable to offer.

For example: they had been using the word "kanban" to describe the process they were using because that was the term applied to the Rational Team Concert (RTC) - template work flow the company created.  They had chosen that workflow because it was easier to use than the complicated scrum workflow the organization's PMO created.  Turns out it had nothing to do with the development process they were using.  They finally agreed that they were not doing Scrum, and didn't really know how to do it... they hadn't learned much from the powerpoint presentation (imagine that).

I got extremely lucky with one of the leaders of this team. She said to the team, that she thought the
team should give the scrum master (me) a chance, just go along with whatever I said, regardless of how stupid it sounded. Try it for a few weeks, it wouldn't hurt, and then in a few weeks decide if it was working for the team, or not.  I learned of this leader's suggestion to her teammates only months later.  It was without a doubt the turning point in the relationship.  After this détente, the team members began to implement with ease suggestions on how they could implement Scrum.  One might say that this leader empowered me, but never said a word about it to me.

We did more workshops in a scrumy fashion, we had a board of items to complete.  We tracked these items on a board right there in the workshop space.  Sometimes we split the topics up more.

Sometimes the topic didn't get finished in the time allotted and we had to decide if it was good enough to continue with other topics and come back later to finish the discovered aspects.  We used the rate at which we were progressing day after day to predict that we wouldn't get all of the topics covered by the end of the week.  But that was good enough, because each day the team selected the most important, most valuable topics and we put off the lease valuable.  Sometimes a topic was dependent upon another item on the board and we had to cover some of a less valuable item so that the dependency was resolved.  In these workshops we covered many Agile principles, the Scrum process framework (3 roles, 3 meetings, 3 artifacts, and a lot more), engineering  practices (many originally defined by Extreme Programming gurus), local organization customs, terms, policies, and procedures.  Much of what was suggested by some agile or scrum nutjob was in contradiction with the customs and policies of the organization - at least on the surface.  Great conversations were developed where the team joined into filling the shared pool of knowledge.  This pool of knowledge now with company and agile/scrum knowledge was easily sorted into new understanding of how both systems could co-exist and interrelate.  It wasn't easy but it generally worked.

The team started understanding the process of Scrum and working toward getting stories in the backlog to done.  Slicing stories that had proven too large in the past and delivering working software to the business each sprint.  They developed the ability to easily estimate a story or an epic set of stories within minutes.  Their ability to read their task board and predict which stories (if any) were not going to get completed within their sprint time-box that they quit wasting time tracking a sprint task burndown.  They understood that if they got into a new domain that ability might be diminished and they could easily revert to tracking task aspirin (a unit of effort; not time) on a chart in the future. The team knew their velocity and could accomplish a sprint planning session in about an hour.  They could predict when they needed to spend more time in refining tough stories before planning and they learned how to slice stories for value and leave the fluff on the cutting room floor.

But all was not well with a performing team...  (cue the scary music - set up a scene with dramatic lighting) ... the manager was looking for a way to measure the team.  And as people are wonting to do... without any thought they look for a dashboard to tell them how well the "team is being run."  They want to know if the "team is being driven at their top performance", and they need some numbers to prove it.  Generally this is a warning indication that many conversations were wasted and no learning occurred,  in hindsight the wrong person was doing too much of the talking and the other didn't draw from the pool of shared knowledge but instead just admired the pool from the shore, never bothering to enter.  The team's manager wanted me to build a dashboard tool using the company's tool of record (RTC) that would give him all the numbers that prove his team is performing well.

Steve Jobs' hiring technique for Managing Knowledge Workers at Apple.

I've made a strategic decision over the years to not become the tooling expert - especially with the bountiful assortment of tools the software project management industry offers.  Needless to say I didn't want to become an expert in RTC (a tool rumored to be on it's way out for this organization that was in their 3rd Agile adoptions curve).  I asked what this dashboard would have on it, what it would display, etc.?  The answer fit on a sticky note, because that's what I had with me... something like velocity, the backlog, and what the team is currently working on was the manager's response.

Here's my Nth mistake.... I hoped the request would dissipate as many thing in a transition tend to do, so I wasn't motivated to create a dashboard for the manager that would reproduce the team's well maintained Scrum task board.  I offered to work with him in reading the board, he attended many of the team's Scrum sessions at the board, rarely engaged but appeared attentive.

[this story will continue ...  as I've lost my round-toit --  wonder if it's with my marbles?]

See Also:
A conversation on Twitter that is an exemplar for empowerment as a command (image the Point of View from the female on your team):
White Male Privilege - a default?
— Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) April 29, 2018


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